Paint the Wind, page 29
Despite my unease about the future, our daily lives proceeded with little time for morbid reflection. Sophie flourished, my painting nourished me as I continued to explore and develop my style, and Matilda became an integral part of our little family.
Andreas’s trial began in November. I dressed somberly and wore a veiled hat. Sitting back in the gallery, I hoped that enough years had passed since the Awakening series to keep the newspapers from recognizing me. A few of Andreas’s more stalwart friends showed up, but I knew from the rumors within the avant-garde community that his reputation had been destroyed.
What I saw in the dock was a broken man. He looked seriously ill, far more than I would have expected his dependence on alcohol to cause. He hadn’t been granted bail because he was considered a flight risk, and two months in a dank jail cell had taken its toll. I saw before my eyes what my absence from his life had precipitated—far more than the months I’d been on Skiathos, when his artistic efforts had been thwarted. This time without me, he’d not only been unable to sustain his physical well-being, but had also collapsed in spirit. I understood well the paralysis that can overwhelm the will to thrive. But perhaps because I had Sophie, I’d been able to rebuild my life and redefine Maya Sircos, Andreas Brenner’s muse, as Maya Sircos, artist.
I listened to the list of my husband’s transgressions, the portrayal of him as a venal, greedy man unable to make a success of his own art, and instead turning himself into a veritable factory of fake masterpieces. I felt no culpability for not being able to save him from himself.
I left the courtroom after the guilty verdict was announced and slipped down a side street to avoid the crowd that had gathered.
Chapter Forty-Two
Oscar returned to Vienna in December as promised. We celebrated Christmas Eve together at the home he shared with Elise. Matilda was with her family for the holiday. Sophie, at nine months, was the center of attention. She fell soundly asleep before the Christkind could shower her with gifts. Both Oscar and Elise encouraged me to spend the night. It had begun to snow, and they convinced me it would be impossible to get a carriage.
We sat companionably before the fire sipping a Riesling wine Oscar had brought back from his travels as far west as the Rheingau. He regaled us with tales of several cities, until Elise got up yawning and excused herself.
Oscar and I sat in silence, hands entwined.
“I want to show you something. I asked Elise not to share it with you until I returned.”
He led me to his own rooms, a study and a bedroom. Elise had been true to her word. I’d never gone in them, all the times I’d been in the apartment. He opened the door and lit the lamp. On the wall opposite his desk was one of my maternal self-portraits.
“It has been a poignant reminder of how you looked that day at Café Central before you gave birth to Sophie. Your trust in me in those frantic hours has sustained me, reminded me why I wait for you.”
I walked into his arms. “Tonight you do not have to wait.”
We made love, the sense memories of that long-ago day in the shepherd’s hut returning without effort. It was a tender exploration, a joyful discovery of the pleasures we had forgone for so long. We fell asleep in each other’s arms and woke again to a need for something more, want unleashed after months of waiting. I had forgotten how it felt to be desired, to be cherished, and opened myself to all that meant—the vulnerability, the longing, the breathlessness of being submerged in each other.
It was one night out of time, snowbound with the city hushed around us.
We ate roasted goose and red cabbage on Christmas Day, and laughed as Sophie ripped apart the wrapping on the gifts left for her under the tree. Sophie and I spent a second night with Elise and Oscar before the roads were cleared and we could make our way to our own home.
We had been invited to my parents’ home on the day after Christmas, a concession of my father’s because of my mother’s entreaties for him to let go of his fury about Andreas.
“The man is in prison. Isn’t that enough?” she had asked him. Apparently he was willing, for the sake of his granddaughter, to put aside his disapproval for at least one day.
I wasn’t prepared for the onslaught of relatives that greeted us when we arrived at Elisabethstrasse. Omama, in all her regal splendor, sat in the parlor holding court and waiting for the presentation of her great-granddaughter. I had dressed Sophie in a burgundy velvet confection my mother had sent, and she looked every inch the Viennese cherub. My aunts had also joined the throng, and it appeared that I was being welcomed back as the prodigal daughter. Perhaps the hope was that with my criminal husband behind bars, I might return to the fold. Since the newspapers had ignored me this time, I might be viewed as a tarnished Madonna.
I have no doubt that there would have been scant welcome for me if it hadn’t been for Sophie. She was dandled on several knees and offered specially baked biscuits to teethe on by Gertraud. Overall, she succeeded in winning everyone’s hearts. As she began to show signs of fatigue that I knew could erupt into a tantrum at any moment, I whisked her up to my old bedroom for a nap.
When she was settled, I got up to return to the family but was interrupted by a knock on the door. It was Papa. He had remained on the edges of the cooing and fussing over Sophie earlier, and I was surprised and somewhat cautious to encounter him now.
“Maya, a word.”
I braced myself.
“I had occasion to meet Hofratin Zuckerkandl and her husband, the professor. They are customers of mine. When she recognized the name, she told me she knew you. She commented not only on your extraordinary talent but also your strength of character and sharp mind for business. She told me it was clear you were her father’s daughter. The story in particular of how you convinced the Secession to exhibit Brenner’s work, despite my abhorrence of that work, struck me as forward-thinking.
“I hope you’ll use that skill to advance your own work now that he is out of your life. Not the nudes. No father wants to see his daughter’s body on display. But the character studies are brilliant. I bought two for my office.”
For a moment, I was speechless. My father hadn’t spoken so many words to me since Skiathos. Mixed though they were, he appeared in his own way to be accepting who I was—and even taking pride in who I had become. Her father’s daughter. That was a phrase I would hold on to.
“Thank you, Papa.”
“Come and see us more often, not only at Christmas.”
“I will.”
I wasn’t ready to kiss him, and he, too, seemed to stiffen at the idea. It had probably taken all of his reserves of generosity to speak to me. Instead, I reached out for his hand and squeezed it.
Chapter Forty-Three
As she had promised, Berta hosted a reading for Oscar on New Year’s Day. It was his first appearance in Vienna, and a crush of literary society filled the apartment on Nußwaldgasse, eager to hear him. I hung back, happy to observe the effusive accolades and listen to the knots of conversation about the book as I moved through the rooms after he spoke. Every now and then, we caught each other’s eye and he shrugged. Women, especially, seemed eager for his attention, placing their hands on his arm and leaning in to offer their whispered praise.
“My brother is the man of the moment,” commented Elise as she approached me and handed me a glass of champagne.
“A well-deserved tribute,” I replied, and smiled as we clinked glasses.
During the afternoon, I found Berta to thank her for speaking to my father.
“He was surprised I knew you, and I think at first he thought I was going to express disapproval. He mistook me for a staid Viennese society matron in the market for exotic decorative art items for my home, rather than someone knowledgeable and appreciative of modern art. As I recited your virtues, the look on his face moved from wariness and dismay that he was about to lose my business to the unabashed pride of a father who loves his daughter. I can see where you get the determination, resilience, and sharpness of mind. It cannot have been easy for him to build a successful life in a parochial city like Vienna.”
Through Berta, both my father and I gained new insights into each other.
Over the next several months, life settled into yet another routine. I painted. Oscar and I deepened our connection, but with discretion. Once a fortnight, I delivered food and art supplies to Andreas in prison. I did not visit with him or write to him, as both activities would have demanded more from me than I was willing to give. But I also could not totally abandon him. Too much of my life had been shaped by my connection to him, but I did not realize how even those small acts of compassion continued to bind me.
It was in April, shortly before Sophie’s first birthday, that I received a telegram informing me Andreas had died of tuberculosis. My first reaction was sadness. What a waste of a life that had once held such promise. He might have emerged after his prison sentence to reclaim his stature as an avant-garde master. Although, if I were being honest, I doubted he would have been capable on his own unless prison had transformed him.
The last act I performed for Andreas was to arrange his funeral. Although he had not been observant in his religion, I sought Berta’s assistance in finding a rabbi willing to conduct the service, and secured a plot in the Jewish section of the Vienna Central Cemetery. He had never revealed his true identity to me or any of his colleagues. I only knew it because of my father’s investigation of his past. On the gravestone, I asked the engraver to carve both his names: “Aaron Bochner, known as the artist Andreas Brenner.” Only a handful of his artist friends attended the service at the grave site, which took place on a glorious spring day. I brought Sophie and gave her a white rose to lay on her father’s grave. The press miraculously ignored us. They had already moved on to other scandals.
Those who attended the funeral joined me at Café Museum afterward. I had sent Sophie home with Matilda. The reminiscences were somber. No one had humorous stories to recount, and there were few words of fondness. It wasn’t merely Andreas’s fall from grace that had silenced the voices. I became aware of how few true connections Andreas had forged. No one knew him, not even I.
When I got home, I removed my widow’s weeds and rocked Sophie.
The snipping of the final thread that had connected me to Andreas released me in unexpected ways. A few months had gone by when Berta planted a seed, as she often did.
“I’m leaving on an extended trip to Paris to visit my sister. You should consider coming at some point. What is happening there artistically is world-changing. You’ve reached a point where spending time there can deeply enrich your work. Think about it.”
Think about it, I did. I was no longer an estranged wife. I was a widow. I was free to choose where and how I would live, and I could afford to do so with my own money.
Elise was particularly enthusiastic about the idea for herself as well when I approached her with the idea.
“I’ve begun to feel my art stagnating. Oscar and I don’t usually stay in one place this long. We don’t have roots here in Vienna, except for our connection with you and Sophie.”
Her words offered me an opportunity to suggest a solution to the one obstacle I had felt impeding my decision to leave—my relationship with Oscar. I never intended to marry again. But I certainly intended to love.
“Why don’t we all go?” I proposed. “We can find a house, live together, and support each other’s endeavors.”
“I love this idea! Our own artists’ commune.”
Oscar was equally enthusiastic, and in the summer of 1910, he went ahead to find us living quarters. Within a month he wrote he had discovered a former piano factory where artists were settling to live and work. We followed eagerly and moved into Le Bateau-Lavoir in September.
On our first morning in Paris, with Sophie in my arms, I looked out from Montmartre at the city below me. A lightness filled me, suffusing me with newfound hope.
I turned and walked back to the studio, ready to begin anew.
PART FOUR
BOSTON and PARIS 1977 - 1978
Chapter Forty-Four
Valerie Langdon removed her loupe, closed her jars of solvents, and cleaned her brushes and scalpels. She stepped back from the fourteenth-century Italian altarpiece she was restoring as a consultant for the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. The work was painstakingly slow, requiring her to deal with everything from wormholes to cracked panels before she had even begun to analyze and repair the colors. But that is what she loved—the slow process of discovery, as layer after layer of dirt and human contact began to be lifted, and then the spark of realization when she could see what the artist had originally intended.
Sometimes she felt as if the devout artisan were whispering in her ear, complaining of bones that ached from the damp cold held in by the thick walls of the cathedral and explaining any oddities that revealed themselves. “I had to rush in this corner,” he confessed. “The priest was pushing me to finish the piece before the Feast of Corpus Christi and the arrival of the archbishop.”
Valerie’s husband, Malcolm, an erudite art historian at Harvard with several books to his name, scoffed at the stories she invented for the artists of the late Medieval and Renaissance periods in which she worked. He did not understand that part of her process was to discern as much as she could about the artists—not only from their materials, the thickness and movement of their brushstrokes, and the length of time it had taken to complete a work, but also the milieu and the tenor of the times in which they painted. If she was to honor their work and bring it as close as possible to its original state, she needed deep in her psyche to know who they were and how they created. Before she had switched her undergraduate major to art history, she had been a theater major at Yale. Although she’d recognized early that a career on the stage was not what she wanted, she had nevertheless retained a sense of craft. Immersing herself in the life of the artist whose work she was restoring was akin to delving into a character as an actress.
She was satisfied with the restoration so far. Unlike its original artist, she didn’t feel harried by the museum. The altarpiece would have a prominent place in the gallery, but not until it was ready.
She buttoned up her coat, wound her scarf around her neck to protect against the bluster of Boston in February, and turned off the lights in the lab. On her way home, she stopped at the Broadway Supermarket to pick up some things for dinner. When she climbed the steps to the front porch of her and Malcolm’s apartment in a two-family house on Ware Street in Cambridge, Malcolm was already home. She could hear him in his study listening to the evening news. She popped her head in to let him know she was home and was about to offer him a drink when she saw he already had one.
“Your Aunt Wanona called earlier and wants you to call her. She left this number.”
“Is everything all right?
“She didn’t say. Only that it was important.”
Wanona Dobbs was Valerie’s mother’s older sister. She had retired early from her work as a teacher and moved to the Catskills to care for her aging father, Valerie’s grandfather. He had been living in Birch Cottage, the house in Twilight Park that had been in the family since Valerie’s great-grandparents had built it in 1888. Grandpa had passed away the summer before, but Wanona had decided to stay.
Before she started making dinner, Valerie dialed the unfamiliar number, reaching the Ellenville Hospital. She waited anxiously as the switchboard connected her with Wanona’s room.
“Hi, Aunt Nonie. What has happened? Why are you in the hospital?”
“Oh, Val, I’m afraid I slipped on the ice when I was out for my morning walk, and now my right leg is in a cast from my ankle to above my knee.”
“Oh, no! Is there anything I can do?”
“Sweetie, I need a huge favor. The hospital is sending me to a nursing home for a few weeks, but in order for me to go home, I’ll need someone to be with me. I hate to ask you, but you’re all I’ve got. Do you think you could come up to Twilight Park?”
Valerie took a deep breath. “For how long?”
“I’m not sure. A month maybe.”
Valerie did some mental calculations. She had at least three more weeks of work left on the altarpiece. If Wanona could stay in the nursing home until then, she could possibly manage it. She didn’t have any new consulting assignments lined up and could afford at least a month without work. She understood that Wanona had no one else to ask. She hadn’t married and had no children of her own. But she’d been a loving aunt and godmother to Valerie.
Wanona had sacrificed to care for her father when she, too, had been the only one in the family who could do it. Valerie’s parents had passed away in an automobile accident when Valerie was at graduate school at New York University. Valerie and Wanona were the only ones left in the family.
“Of course I’ll come!” After writing down the details of the nursing home where Wanona was going to be sent, Valerie poured herself a Scotch and made dinner.
She wanted Malcolm to have another drink and a good meal before she announced her plans. As she suspected, he wasn’t thrilled.
“What about the edits for my new book? I was counting on you to tackle them as soon as you finished the altarpiece.”
“I can take the manuscript with me and send you corrected pages every week in the mail. Birch Cottage has electricity. It’s not completely primitive, so I can bring the electric typewriter.”
Valerie had been helping Malcolm with his books since they’d met as students at the Institute of Fine Arts at NYU. He had been earning his PhD, and she typed papers for other students to earn extra money while she was studying for her Master of Science in art conservation. Eventually, after they’d begun dating, she had expanded her work to include editing for him and then researching. It was work she enjoyed, and after they had married five years earlier, their academic partnership had produced his two well-received books on twentieth-century artists.
