The Light of Paris

Copyright

The Borough Press

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

Published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2016

First published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2016

Copyright © Eleanor Brown 2016

Cover design: Holly Macdonald © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2016. Cover images © Vo Y Phong Mickael/EyeEm/Getty (Paris); Shutterstock.com (frame)

Eleanor Brown asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins

Sourse ISBN: 9780007393688

Ebook Edition © February 2016 ISBN: 9780007393695

Version: 2016-06-06

Dedication

For my parents and my grandparents, especially my grandmothers:

Madeline Mercier Brown and Catherine McReynolds Barnes

Epigraph

Paris in the rain is still Paris.

—Catherine Rémine McReynolds,

November 18, 1923

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

One: Madeleine – 1999

Two: Margie – 1919

Three: Madeleine – 1999

Four: Margie – 1924

Five: Madeleine – 1999

Six: Margie – 1924

Seven: Madeleine – 1999

Eight: Margie – 1924

Nine: Madeleine – 1999

Ten: Margie – 1924

Eleven: Madeleine – 1999

Twelve: Margie – 1924

Thirteen: Madeleine – 1999

Fourteen: Margie – 1924

Fifteen: Madeleine – 1999

Sixteen: Margie – 1924

Seventeen: Madeleine – 1999

Eighteen: Margie – 1924

Nineteen: Madeleine – 1999

Twenty: Margie – 1924

Twenty-One: Madeleine – 1999

Twenty-Two: Margie – 1924

Twenty-Three: Madeleine – 1999

Twenty-Four: Margie – 1924

Twenty-Five: Madeleine – 1999

Twenty-Six: Margie – 1924

Twenty-Seven: Madeleine – 1999

Twenty-Eight: Margie – 1924

Twenty-Nine: Madeleine – 1999

Acknowledgments

Author’s Note

About the Author

Also by Eleanor Brown

About the Publisher

one

MADELEINE

1999

I didn’t set out to lose myself. No one does, really. No one purposely swims away from the solid, forgiving anchor of their heart. We simply make the tiniest of compromises, the smallest of decisions, not realizing the way those small changes add up to something larger until we are forced, for better or worse, to face the people we have become.

I had the best of intentions, always: to make my mother happy, to keep the peace, to smooth my rough edges and ease my own way. But in the end, the life I had crafted was like the porcelain figurines that resided in my mother’s china cabinets: smooth, ornate, but delicate and hollow. For display only. Do not touch.

Long ago, I might have called myself an artist. As a child, I drew on every blank surface I encountered—including, to my mother’s dismay, the walls, deliciously empty front pages of library books, and more than a few freshly ironed tablecloths. In high school, I spent hours in the art room after school, painting until the sun coming through the skylights grew thin and the art teacher would gently put her hand on my shoulder and tell me it was time to go home. Lingering under my Anaïs Anaïs perfume was the smell of paint, and the edges of every textbook I owned were covered with doodles and drawings. On the weekends, I hid from my mother’s bottomless disapproval in the basement of our house, where I had set up an easel, painting until my fingers were stiff and the light had disappeared, rendering the colors I blended on the palette an indiscriminate black.

But I hadn’t painted since I had gotten married. Now, I spent hours leading tour groups through the Stabler Art Museum’s galleries, pointing out the beautiful blur of the Impressionists, the lush clarity of the Romantics, the lawless color of Abstract Expressionism. As we moved between the rooms, I showed them the progression of the paintings, movement washing into movement like the confluence of rivers, the same medium, the same tools, yet so completely different in appearance, in intent, in heart. No matter how many times I explained it, it seemed beautifully impossible that Monet had been creating his gentle pastorals less than a hundred years before the delicious chaos of Jackson Pollock’s murals.

It was almost enough.

Usually Tanis took the older kids; she had four teenage sons and wasn’t afraid of anything. But she was out, and the other docents were booked, so the coordinator asked if I would take the group. I had hesitated for a moment—teenagers seemed scary and uncontrolled, all loose limbs and incomprehensible fashion decisions and bad attitudes—and then told him I would. Their teacher would be with us, after all, and she had requested one of my favorite tours, on artists and their influences.

When I met them in the lobby, I asked the kids their names and who their favorite artists were, to which they, predictably, reacted as though I were trying to get them to divulge state secrets. Their teacher, Miss Pine, was young and slender, with hair that fell loose around her shoulders, more knot than curl, as though she wound her fingers in it all the time. I—and most of the women I knew—wore slim sheath dresses with elegant scarves, an acceptably polite pop of color, but Miss Pine was wrapped in a pile of boysenberry-colored fabric that looked less like a dress and more like a collection of handkerchiefs that had been safety-pinned together. She must have been wearing bracelets or bells, because she jingled as she moved. Either that, or she was hiding a number of out-of-season reindeer underneath those swathes of fabric.

“How long have you been teaching?” I asked, making conversation as we headed to the first stop on the tour, followed by our little ducklings, the floors creaking agreeably beneath our feet.

“Almost ten years,” Miss Pine said, smiling at me. I must have made a face of horror, because she laughed, a light sound with a rough edge that made me smile just to hear it. “They’re not so bad, are they?”

Glancing over my shoulder at the kids, who meandered along in our wake as we climbed the wide marble staircase to the second floor, I laughed too. “Not so bad.” The boys were bouncing off each other like pinballs, a couple of the girls walked with their heads bent together in the inimitable intimacy of teenagers, a few others drifted off to the edges of the staircase to look at the paintings that lined the walls or the sculptures on the landing.

“I just have lingering flashbacks to my own experience. I didn’t cope so well with high school kids when I was in high school myself. I basically spent four years slinking around, trying to fly under the radar.”

Miss Pine waved her hand, setting off her bells again. “We all did. It’s much easier from this side of the desk, I promise you. Plus, you get to try to make it a slightly less miserable experience for them than it was for you.”

“All right, ladies and gentlemen, first stop,” I said when we reached the Renaissance room. I turned to face them, clapping my hands together and then instantly regretting it. I was not an earnest, hand-clapping, Precious Moments stationery–using sort of person. “What do you know about Renaissance art? Lay it on me.”

The kids, who had been chattering enthusiastically as we walked, of course chose that moment to fall sullenly silent. Elementary-aged children seemed almost violent in their desire to speak, hurling their entire bodies into the air when they raised their hands, as though they were controlled by marionette strings. But these high schoolers were draped with languid adolescent ease that didn’t hide the twitch of their eyes, their anxious fingers worrying their pencils, the edges of their sketch pads. I had thought for sure the Renaissance paintings might get them, all those nudes with their tender, pale skin and tactfully placed hands and leaves, but they seemed only politely interested.

“Come on, people,” I said. “I’m getting you out of school for the day. The least you can do is answer my questions.”

Miss Pine and a couple of the kids grinned. Eliza, a girl with long brown braids and a T-shirt bearing a faded print of Munch’s The Scream, raised her hand. She reminded me a little of myself at that age—a spray of pimples across her forehead, curls breaking free of her braids, a thick, sturdy body. She held a paintbrush between her fingers, perhaps in case of an unexpected art emergency, which kind of made me want to give her a hug.

“My savior!” I said. “Pray, my lady, speak.”

Eliza flushed a little as her classmates turned to look at her, but when she spoke, her voice was loud and clear and confident. Or at least as confident as a teenage girl could be, her voice lilting up into questions at the end. “They were really interested in, like, Classical art? Like, Greeks?”

“And the Romans, yeah!” I said. I was so excited someone was actually talking that I might have spoken a little too loudly, because a boy named Lam, his black hair swept into a style that made him look as though he were standing in a wind tunnel, actually took a step back. I cleared my throat and tried for something a little less enthusiastic, the reserved voice I used in the rest of my life, where I spent all my time talking about things I didn’t care about. “They were fascinated by Greco-Roman culture, and you can see those influences everywhere. Take this painting, for instance,” I said, pointing at a piece by an Italian artist. “Do you see these sculptures running along the top of the building in the background?”

The kids leaned forward and I suppressed a grin. So they were interested after all. It was just a matter of breaking through their external cool to find the real people underneath.

Lam spoke up. “It looks like those friezes on the Parthenon.”

“It does, doesn’t it?” I said. “And that’s not an accident. They were trying to revitalize art, so they went looking for the pinnacle of artistic achievement, and they found it in Classical art.”

“So they were copying?” a short, slender girl asked. I couldn’t remember her name. When she had introduced herself, I was distracted by how small and insubstantial she seemed, as though she were a shadow her owner had left behind.

“It’s not copying,” a boy named Hunter said, his words dripping with disdain. “It’s like, inspiration.” The shadow girl dropped her chin, shrinking even further into herself, and I wanted to rush to her rescue. Hunter was good-looking in the irritatingly effortless way some teenage boys have, their features delicate and girlishly pretty, and I could tell from the way the other kids arranged themselves around him that he was the center of their social constellation.

Fortunately, Miss Pine stepped in before I had to. “Dial down the attitude, Hunter,” she said mildly, and I watched the kids shift again, Hunter deflating slightly, the shadow girl glancing up from underneath her eyelashes, the others looking somewhat relieved. I gave Miss Pine a mental high five. “It’s a fair moral question, given how much you all get harangued about plagiarism.”

“And that’s really what we’re here to talk about today, right? Where artists get their ideas, their techniques, their style,” I said.

“From each other,” Eliza said, waving her paintbrush at me.

“Exactly,” I said. “Why don’t we go check out the Neoclassicists and see some more examples?”

Our conversation was livelier in the Neoclassical room, where I managed to engage the kids in a conversation about the Romans, possibly because I mentioned vomitoriums. Proof that no one ever progresses past the age of thirteen, and when nudity fails, gross-out humor is always a good idea.

When the kids had exhausted their (fairly impressive) repertoire of throw-up jokes, I gave them a few minutes to linger in the room. Some of them were sketching wildly, and I felt my fingers itch as I watched them. The self-conscious tightness that had surrounded them fell away, and their inner eager elementary schoolers sprang out. Long ago, that would have been me, so desperate to create I could hardly keep my hands still.

I leaned against the wall, and Miss Pine came to stand beside me. “Anyway,” she said, continuing our earlier conversation as though it had never been interrupted, “teaching is really the best way to stay in touch with my own art. If I’m encouraging them to create, I’d feel like a fraud if I didn’t do it myself. What about you? Are you an artist?”

“Oh, no. I mean, I took art in school, but that’s not, I mean, it wasn’t real,” I said hurriedly, lest she get the wrong idea.

“Really?” She raised a pale eyebrow. “But you talk about it so passionately. I just assumed …”

Tamping down the longing that always emerged when I was talking about art, I shook my head. “I wanted to be a painter, but I just … I guess I just grew out of it.”

The truth was far too difficult to explain, especially to Miss Pine, with her heart big and warm enough for these kids and their self-conscious eyes, and the earnest chitter of her jewelry. This was the bargain I had made. I knew Phillip had married me partially because he had zero taste and I knew something about art, but I was only allowed to be in contact with it in the most clinical of ways, preferably ones that made him look good. I could visit dealers and haggle over paintings for his office, or for the condo, purchases based more on square footage and their power to impress and/or intimidate the person looking at them than on artistic merit. I could lead tours here, volunteer, but I couldn’t make art myself.

“Art isn’t something you grow out of just because you’re not a teenager anymore. It’s not like falling out of love with a teen idol.”

I clutched at my heart in fake horror. “Don’t even joke about that. Isn’t it your job to protect teenage dreams?”

“Not officially, but I suppose I do it anyway. See, if I’d been your teacher, you wouldn’t have given up painting.”

“Ah, but then who would do the glamorous job of introducing apathetic teenagers to the glories of Rembrandt?” I asked.

“I’m sure someone would step into the breach. Not that I’m mocking what you do. You’re a volunteer, right?”

“Right,” I said, though I wasn’t sure whether volunteering truly made what I did more impressive. The deal was, I worked for free and got to pretend I was altruistic and not just bored to tears with the Chicago Women’s Club and the achingly dull business events Phillip insisted I attend with him.

And leading tours brought its own kind of discomfort, the way it boxed me in as surely as any of those other duties. When I talked to tour groups, I spoke about technique, about chiaroscuro and proportion, about brushwork and craquelure with the confidence of a scholar, but I never spoke about the way art made me feel. I never spoke about how seeing a painting for the first time—really seeing it—is a wondrous thing. When I open my eyes to a painting, it is as though everything has changed and will never be the same again. Colors look more vivid, the lines and edges of objects sharper, and I fall in love with the world and all its beauty—the tragedies and love stories on the faces of people walking by, the shine of a wet sidewalk or the way the leaves offer their pale bellies to the wind before a storm. I want to weep for a broken eggshell below a bird’s nest, for its jagged edges and the bird inside freed to take flight.

When we finished the tour, Miss Pine let her students spin off where they wanted—to sketch, she told them sternly, not to the gift shop or the café. A few of them wandered back to the Renaissance rooms (I suppose Venus’ bare breasts had been rather too much to turn down after all); a few others lingered with the vibrant beauty of the Impressionists.

“Listen,” Miss Pine said, coming over and thrusting a postcard at me, the edges slightly soft and bent from her bag, “if you change your mind and want to get in touch with your inner teenager, I’m teaching a painting class this weekend at a new studio in Bucktown. It starts tonight. You should come.”

Staring down at the postcard as though it were the door to Narnia, I pictured it: a bright studio, the smell of paint and canvas, the weight of the brush resting against the curve underneath my thumb, both new and familiar.

“That’s very kind of you,” I said, slipping back into that smooth, emotionless voice that was my armor, “but I have plans.” My presence had been demanded at one of Phillip’s dinners that night, and the next day I was leaving to visit my mother. I didn’t want to do either of those things, would far rather have spent the weekend at that painting class, but my life was heavy with obligations and light on everything I wanted to do.

She shrugged. “Another time, then. My phone number is right there.” She pointed at the bottom of the card, and I saw a smudge of dried paint on the inside of her finger, a sight so familiar it confused me—was it her hand, or mine, a decade ago? “No pressure. Just fun.”

“Thank you,” I said, knowing I would never reach out to her. I knew it was better to keep that part of myself at bay, but to my surprise, that knowledge felt sharp and raw, as though it were new and not years old.

After Miss Pine and the students left, I ate a handful of cookies in the staff room, shoving them so quickly into my mouth that they scraped against my tongue, then gathered my things and went home. Sometimes I took the long way, in order to pass a string of galleries that always had something deliciously irreverent and exciting on display, but I had to meet Phillip. He was desperately trying to make a deal with a developer named Teddy Stockton, which meant I was doomed to making polite conversation with Teddy’s wife, Dimpy, and the other wives all night.

At home, I paused at the front door. Lately I had found myself in a strange, black moment of hope every night, a half wish that my husband would not come home.

I didn’t want anything bad to happen to him; I just wished he would go away. He could disappear through a wormhole, or a circle of standing stones. Or maybe one day he would simply decide he’d had enough and move to some Caribbean island without me. I’d wish him well, honestly. I’d pack up his things and send them down to him with a tube of sunscreen and my best wishes. It would be tidy and emotionless and no one would be to blame.

I didn’t wonder about the meaning behind these thoughts. I had spent so long swallowing every unpleasant feeling I had that it never occurred to me that having a recurring fantasy in which your husband disappears is probably a sign that something is terribly wrong.

But of course there was no magical circle of stones and no Caribbean island, because when I opened the door, there he was, standing in the kitchen, flipping through the mail. He looked, as he always did, as though he were posing for a catalog photo.

Phillip was older than I was, dancing on the edge of forty, but he would be one of those men who simply became better looking as he aged, less pretty and more handsome, like a movie star, or a newscaster. As I had no interest in plastic surgery, I imagined the gulf between our attractiveness would only continue to widen, until I, wrinkled and tired and gray, would look like the maiden aunt he generously escorted to charity functions.

“You’re late,” he said as I set down my purse and reached for the sweater I kept in the coat closet. The floor-to-ceiling windows that allowed one to sit on the uncomfortable couch and admire the endless view of Lake Michigan were also, I was fairly sure, the main reason our home was always so chilly. The moment I came home, even during the summer, I slipped on that sweater. I wore socks and slippers at all times and when I stepped out of the shower, I hurried as quickly as possible into a towel and a bathrobe, the water beading into ice on my skin.

“Sorry,” I said perfunctorily, walking past him into the living room. We didn’t kiss hello or goodbye, not anymore. We had never been a particularly demonstrative couple—Phillip was too concerned with what other people thought, and I was too afraid, even after we were married, of being rejected—but now he didn’t even brush his lips across my forehead when he left for the day. The cool exterior we were required to present to the world had swept its way into our private lives, turning us into strangers at a cocktail party who were sure they had met before, giving each other curious glances across the room. Don’t I know you from … Didn’t we once …

Gathering the mail into a stack, he tapped the pile against the kitchen counter, a smooth, black granite that made it irritatingly impossible to find the dirty spots. “Hurry up. Put on the black dress you wore to the library fundraiser. You look like you ate too much today.”

I looked down at the gray dress I had worn to the museum, trying to spot a telltale cookie bump. Maybe I had eaten a few too many, but I couldn’t have gained that much weight in an afternoon. Then again, Phillip always seemed to know when I had eaten something I shouldn’t have. He was like a well-dressed bloodhound, and if I ate anything other than carrot sticks, he nailed me for it every time, even though I had finally learned to check my shirts for powdered sugar before going home.

“Fine,” I said, heading into the bedroom to change into the black dress. Fighting with him wasn’t worth the effort—it was easier to eat what he told me to, wear what he wanted me to, act how he thought I should. He was a little like my mother in that way, though in a competition between them, he’d never win. Phillip was used to getting his way, but my mother could kill you with canapés and kindness.

I changed into the assigned dress and slipped on a pair of heels that pinched at my toes. My stomach was tight and painful, but there were no antacids left in the bathroom. After going through a couple of evening bags and the bedside table, I finally found some in my closet and threw them in my mouth, wiping my hands on the hem of my dress as I walked back into the living room.