The Darts of Cupid: Stories (8 page)

I said, "Golly. That’s devastating. And I’ve known them all these years. And it’s never occurred to me."

Without replying, he lowered his eyelids and bent his head. IT SHOULD NOT BE said that our family was alien to the world of art. Professor Wieland, Dean of the Academy of Painting and Sculpture in Prague, had supplied us with all the pictures we owned. There was a life-size portrait of my mother at the age of four, costumed for a children’s fancy-dress party in the brittle blue-silver-yellow brocaded attire of an infanta of Spain, done in the manner of Velázquez. There was my uncle Frederick as a six-year-old, in the guise of a boy of the Styrian Alps—in chamois shorts and a green-trimmed loden coat, resting on a spade, with a basket filled with flaming blue gentian flowers at his feet—all painted in the smoothly glossy, idyllic Biedermeier manner. The professor did admit that, in accordance with the genre, there should have been a small black-and-white dog in there instead of the gentians, but that he had not felt up to it. There was also a head-and-shoulders of my grandmother, as a young woman of twenty-eight, wearing a feather boa, which was stippled in the Divisionist manner of Segantini. And there were four large, equal-sized flower pieces, which the professor had brought to bloom in the shadowy, mushy, velvety style of Odilon Redon.

We are always dissatisfied when confronted with the portrait of someone we know. This is inevitable, because we have not known that person as the painter has. But since I had not known my mother, or Uncle Frederick, or my grandmother, at the ages of four, six, and twenty-eight, respectively, I held no grudge against their portraits and was truly fond of them. The only hint of resentment I felt was in my grandmother’s case, not because of her lush, fleshy beauty in the portrait—she now had a marmoreal distinction—but because in the picture she had an expression I had never seen on her. In the portrait the short, voluptuous lips were half parted, revealing a glimmer of teeth, while her eyes were half veiled and hooded, under strangely heavy lids. All this lent her an unfamiliar, unfathomable, haughty, triumphantly satisfied air that I found perplexing and troubling.

Late one afternoon, a few days after the Haussman reception, Professor Wieland came to call, explaining that, finding himself in our neighborhood, he had wanted to drop in and lay his admiration at my grandmother’s feet. She was not in, as it happened, yet he could not refuse to join my mother in the drawing room for a short while.

Emma, our parlor maid, was sent to fetch me. "You’d better go in, Miss Edith," she told me. "Give a helping hand to madam your mother. Finds him a bit of heavy going. You get along and show a pretty snout. Madam your mother’s got to tugging at her pearls already—that’s always a bad sign."

Despite my mother’s dislike of having to listen to disquisitions on theories of art, it could not be denied that Professor Wieland was an ornament in any drawing room. Tall and narrow-boned, he was a much sought dinner guest who had kept his elegant leanness even now, in his seventies. With his gold-rimmed pince-nez and short white pointed beard, he bore a striking likeness to the distinguished figure of our President Masaryk—a mold often encountered among academicians of his generation. Always formally dressed and never gesticulating, he could be relied upon to listen with a grave yet tolerant urbanity and to fill embarrassing blanks in the flow of conversation with meticulously sexless anecdotes about celebrities in the arts. I cherished this one: Brahms, asked to dinner by a rich admirer, has his glass filled as the host murmurs, "This is the Brahms among my wines." Brahms takes a sip, considers, and says, "Let’s have up the Beethoven, shall we?"

As soon as I had joined my mother and the Professor, I burst out with the news that Dalibor was going to do the Cardinal Archbishop. It was inevitable that Dalibor should then be discussed. The tone, I knew, would be acid, because Dalibor was an almost nationally known celebrity, whereas the Professor’s name had never reached anyone outside Prague society. From the beginning, Dalibor had made his name with his flattering portrait drawings— heads and hands in red chalk, on pike gray paper, which gave even uncouth clients the conviction that they belonged to the elect. His spectacular rise to widespread fame had been achieved by his portrait of President Masaryk, which, in reproduction, was displayed, year in and year out, in the windows of most of the select shops on the seventh of March, which was the President’s birthday.

"The trouble with Dalibor," the Professor said now, "is that he is supposed to be a draftsman. But he doesn’t draw, he embroiders." He saw our bewildered glances and explained. "The great masters—say, Raphael, or, if you want to get contemporary, Braque or Picasso—when they draw, it’s done in one single, thin, clear line. And with this, miraculously, they get depth, volume, texture, expression, all in one clean sweep. Dalibor labors. He
knits
—one plain, one purl—and then does crochet work on the edges, and the victim’s head comes out of the murk like the marrow dumpling floating up in the noodle soup."

My mother nodded with what she no doubt hoped was a thoughtful air and tugged at her string of pearls.

"Yet one could forgive him his doodling if he were a nicer person himself," the Professor went on. "Only the great can afford to be nasty. But no, Dalibor plays the game with the cards held close to his chest, and if you try to get near him he can get quite nasty. Doubly naughty. Because he does it all so wickedly that you don’t realize he is jeering at you."

"What’s the good of jeering at someone if they don’t know it?" my mother said.

"That’s where his wickedness comes in. He gets a thrill out of being offensive without letting the other one know, and at the same time he takes good care that all the other people present should see he’s jeering. Don’t you see?"

"I don’t see," said my mother.

"I’ve been with Dalibor at a dinner party," said the Professor, "when the host was trying to draw him out about van Gogh. Granted, one does not much like to have to sing for one’s supper. Dalibor said, ‘Do you mean van Gogh the Flemish sixteenth-century still-life painter of fowl and game?’ Then, looking wide-eyed up and down the table during the sudden silence, he said, ‘Well, how was I to know which one you meant?’

"But that’s nothing. I’ll tell you a truly outrageous performance of his. We are at an at-home, at the Baron Borodyn’s, and we are standing in this corner, Dalibor and I, and up comes this woman, rush rush rush, gush gush gush, and we are trapped. She starts on Dalibor: how she’s always wanted to ask him did he have this wonderful gift from the cradle or did he hit on it later in life? Dalibor says, ‘Later in life, and by the merest chance.’ He tells her it happened when he was seven years old, and sitting on a rock shelf in the Carpathian Mountains, minding his father’s goats, and, with a hazel rod, drawing idly in the soil at his feet. Along comes this stranger, stops behind him, looks at his tracings, and says, ‘You are a God-gifted artist. And I, Picasso, shall see to it that you get the tuition you so richly deserve.’ "

"This sounds perfectly crazy," my mother said.

"Not perfectly crazy, dear madam. Just perfectly naughty. Because what Dalibor was dishing up was, of course, the old chestnut about how Giotto was discovered by Cimabue, but brought up to date."

"How very interesting," said my mother, her voice bleached with boredom. Then, in a tone of renewed vigor: "Who was she? The gushing woman, I mean. Anyone one knows?"

"Zavadil."

"Which of the Zavadils—the ones who are in distilling, or the ones who are in spinning and weaving? Did she have an enormous bosom right down to her knees?"

"Exactly. Architecturally speaking, the balcony came right down to the columns of the edifice."

"That’s the one," said my mother. "Handkerchiefs and tablecloths. They have their factories up north. In Hohenelbe."

"As far as I’m concerned you can leave Hohenelbe out of it," the Professor said. "The bosom was quite enough."

After a silence he went on. "The trouble with Dalibor is he has no love."

"How do you mean?" said my mother. "He never pays court to a woman, that’s true. He’s never been known to be keen on anyone. But then, for all you know, he may have someone tucked away in Vienna. Doing it on the cheap— milliner’s apprentice, that kind of creature. Called Mitzi. They’re always called Mitzi."

"I wasn’t referring to that," he said. "Not that kind of love. I meant that he can’t be bothered, Mitzi or otherwise."

"Selfish, you mean?"

"No," said the Professor. "That’s not what I meant, either. Because if he were egotistical he’d be in love with himself, and that wouldn’t be so bad, would it? The trouble with Dalibor is that he doesn’t even love himself. If you ask me, that’s fatal."

"This is getting too high for me," my mother said. "And too deep." Then, giving me an angry glance, she said, "Edith, do stop lounging. Sit up straight." Whenever she was feeling at a disadvantage, my mother would turn on me in this fashion, but I did not resent it on this occasion. I had found the Professor’s conversation rewarding, even if it made me share my mother’s bewilderment about Dalibor. My mother never understood. I did, but later.

I RAN INTO Dalibor the very next day, on a bright, wind-still, frosty afternoon on the Graben. He was standing in front of Lippert’s, contemplating one of their display windows with brooding stubbornness. He seemed completely unaware of his surroundings. I knew that the chef Karasek, who was probably now in his kitchen at the rear of Lippert’s devoting himself to the care of someone’s double-strength consommé, was a Sunday painter, and that my grandmother had once prevailed upon Professor Wieland to look at Karasek’s pictures, and that the Professor had declared that the chef had "a true gift for the rhythm of pattern making," evolved from his habitual "painting" with aspic and mayonnaise. This had been kind of the Professor. It occurred to me now that Dalibor would never have been willing to be party to such a charade.

Dalibor, on this day, was not wearing the opulent, beaver-lined, Astrakhan-collared coat one might have expected but a dark blue topcoat with a narrow velvet collar: sleek, modest, sober. It went perfectly with his habit of standing apart from the crowd, here on the Graben or in a corner at parties.

"Dalibor," I said. "I was just thinking of you."

"Irresistibly?"

I said, "Irresistibly."

"This is so sudden."

"It isn’t. Because only yesterday we were discussing you. I couldn’t resist telling Professor Wieland that you were doing the Cardinal Archbishop. Because I wanted to see him turn green with envy."

"And did he?"

"Oh, quite."

"Grass green or bile green?"

"Bile green."

"It’s odd how impressed you are," he said. "To me it’s just work. One head, one hand. If it’s both hands, I charge more." And when I looked at him doubtingly, he added, "But now I’m going to do something really worthwhile. Out of the ordinary. May I walk along with you? Because it’s getting cold standing about?"

We started toward the Gunpowder Tower, and he said, "I’ll explain. A brother. A brother and a sister. In their sixties. He two years older than she is. Living in the sticks in Moravia—small castle, fields growing mainly cucumbers, the mean, nobbly ones, for pickling. Now, when he was ten and she was eight, they had their portraits painted, half-bust—he holding a lemon, she holding an orange. Now, fifty years later, they want to be done again, half-bust: he holding a lemon, she holding an orange. I’ll do them in oils, trying to hit them off in the same style as before. That’s what I call ‘rewarding.’ "

I did not reply.

He said, "You have even stopped looking at me. The story makes you feel shivery, doesn’t it?"

"Rather, but I don’t know why," I said.

"I’ll tell you why. Because you’ve guessed that, needless to say, neither of them ever got married. Never moved away from their place. Didn’t want to."

"Ghastly," I said. "It makes you think."

"You are wrong. Portrait painters never think. They paint."

I gave him a glance and looked away.

He said, "It reminds me of something else. Something the same, though different. Quite aboveboard this time, no incest. Listen. Friends of mine in Paris, they have this picture. Small thing, like this and like this," and he sketched the size with the fingers of both hands spread wide. "Eighteenth-century, pure Louis Quinze. A harbor scene, sort of Neapolitan fanciful. Men fumbling about with boats and nets, sliver of sea, rocks, that kind of stuff. Bright sun, hot-looking aerial perspective, the figures bending or stretching, all stock-in-trade but very slick.

"Next to this picture, another picture. Same size, same place, same harbor, same figures doing their stuff. But sea in turmoil, sky stormy, gloom and menace. Now, how do you like that?"

"Wonderful," I said. "Who did it?"

"No one you’ve ever heard of. St. Croix de Marseille, a follower of Joseph Vernet, who was the best seascape painter in France at that time. The odd thing is, these friends of mine, they had the sunny picture for ages. And picked up the stormy one, oh, about ten years after the other. At an auction."

I said, "I suppose you go a lot to Paris."

"I don’t. I don’t like Paris. And I don’t like the French. This
politesse française
gets on my nerves. Even when they are excessively nasty, they are excessively polite. These friends of mine aren’t French, by the way. They’re from the Burgenland, the same as I—half Bohemian, half Hungarian, half Austrian, the same as I. I’d never go to Paris if it weren’t for them."

We had by now reached Joseph’s Square. Halting in front of the military barracks, and taking off his hat as a sign that he now intended to depart, Dalibor added, "The French are such formal people. It’s a wonder they ever manage to make children." I looked away, embarrassed, and when I saw the soldiers standing guard in the sentry boxes flanking the portal of the building, I felt still more flustered, although I had told myself that they could not possibly have heard us. I left him without saying good-bye.