The Shadows of Foxworth Page 3

  “Of course,” Papa said. He beckoned to Yvon. Yvon walked slowly to the car. I could see he wasn’t happy. He looked sullen. He should have been first, I thought. He’s older, and he’s a boy. I got out quickly.

  “It’s scary,” I told him.

  He didn’t reply. He got in, and Papa waved to everyone and turned around.

  “Your father is like a little boy again,” Mama said.

  “His painting was worth far more,” Jean-Paul muttered. “He sold it too quickly.”

  I glanced at him with surprise, and he shrugged. “But what do I know? The world is moving too fast for me now, Marlena. What was important is no longer as important.”

  “Don’t complain about it, Jean-Paul. You’ll be driven from your house to ours for dinner faster,” Mama said. “That’s for sure.”

  “The food couldn’t be any better than it is because of that,” Jean-Paul told her, and they laughed.

  I looked at the cloud of dust and thought about the sad expression on Yvon’s face. Why didn’t Papa take him first? He surely knew Yvon would be more interested in motorcars. Perhaps he was planning to do something special after he had given me and Mama quick rides, I thought.

  As it turned out, I was right. It took them much longer to return, and when they did, Yvon was driving, with his face so washed in a smile that I thought it would never change. To my surprise, when they stopped and got out, Yvon answered more questions about the vehicle than Papa did. Even the man who had brought the vehicle looked impressed with him.

  “Where did you learn all that about the automobile?” I asked him later, after he and Papa washed it so it would remain looking brand-new.

  “Newspapers. Papa doesn’t care as much about the real world.”

  “What does that mean? You can be so frustrating sometimes, Yvon, with your bird words.”

  He laughed. “Papa’s an artist. He isn’t interested in facts. He’s interested in beauty and mystery,” he replied. He turned from the vehicle and looked out at the sea, as if he heard voices coming from it, as if all his wisdom was brought in with the tide.

  The sun was slipping like a gold plate into the water. Traces of clouds were thinning out and turning into phantoms. When we were younger, Papa would sit with us on the beach sometimes after dinner and ask us to describe clouds at twilight. He said that was when they changed into their true selves. Yvon always saw animals or insects. I saw flowers sometimes and birds most of the time. When I asked Papa what he saw, he thought and said, “They’re still becoming what they are. They’re people’s dreams.”

  What was Yvon dreaming about now?

  “Got to get back to work,” he said. “There is a pair of shoes I promised to finish today. See you at dinner.” He started away, never having walked with more pride, his shoulders high and straight. He turned once to smile and wave to me.

  The crowd of villagers began to break up, everyone shaking Papa’s hand and wishing him luck with his new vehicle. For a while afterward, it practically took over our lives. Every night after dinner for the next few weeks, Papa and Yvon would wash the red automobile to keep it looking new. They wouldn’t permit a spot of mud on it. Mama and I would stand by and laugh at them, Mama telling Papa he might have to get permission to marry the thing.

  “Thing? Thing? You can’t call this a thing!” Papa cried. “It’s the beginning of the future.”

  “I can’t see how getting somewhere faster makes that much difference unless it’s an emergency,” she told him.

  He threw up his hands and cried, “Women!”

  What I did like about the new vehicle was how it seemed to bring Yvon and Papa closer together. They took it for more rides, fidgeted over parts, and planned out trips. It sat only two, so I didn’t go along, but I wasn’t as excited about it as Yvon was. A little more than a week later, when Papa suggested Yvon take me for a ride, Mama objected.

  “He needs more practice with you,” she told him. I saw how hurt Yvon was. He always showed his displeasure by looking down and quickly doing something else, especially if Mama said anything remotely negative about him.

  “There’s not that much to it,” Papa told her. “He knows more about it than I do, and he’s certainly not going to confront too many of these vehicles out there.”

  “It goes too fast, Beau. Please,” she begged.

  Papa softened the blow by deciding to give more time to Yvon’s practicing and less time to his painting.

  “You’ll take your mother for a ride first, then,” he told Yvon. “That way, she’ll see how good you are.”

  That seemed to mend his hurt feelings. As it turned out, she told him that he drove better than Papa.

  “Your father is too distracted. No matter how fast we go, he sees something he thinks he might paint,” she told him.

  I was standing beside Papa at the time. He nodded and laughed.

  “Who knows me better than your mother?” he said.

  After that, she gave Yvon permission to take me for a ride. But she refused to let him take Louis or any other boy.

  “I know you’d like to show off,” she said, “but I’m afraid of how they might dare you to go too fast.”

  “No one makes me do what I don’t want to do,” Yvon snapped back at her, with an unusual abruptness and rage in his eyes.

  She just stared at him, but with an expression on her face I couldn’t ever recall seeing. It was as if she was looking at someone else and not her son. She glanced at me and realized it, quickly returning to herself.

  “We all have our weak moments, Yvon. When you think too much of yourself, you either hurt yourself or someone you love,” she said softly.

  It made him blink, and he suddenly looked more ashamed than angry. However, he didn’t apologize. He looked down, and then he turned and walked away.

  “He didn’t mean to be disrespectful, Mama,” I said. “Yvon doesn’t think too much of himself.”

  She looked after him and then at me, barely changing her expression. “He doesn’t know himself completely,” she said. “He doesn’t know who he is.”

  “What?” I smiled. Did Yvon inherit bird words from her?

  “There are things inside you, inside us all, that we have not yet realized, Marlena. That is why it’s best to be more humble and move a little slower at times. We spend most of our lives learning about ourselves and not, as everyone thinks, learning about others.”

  She looked at Yvon walking away. “Someday he’ll understand.”

  “What about me, Mama?”

  “You’ll both understand.”

  She folded her arms, pulled up the collar of her blouse, and walked around the house to go up the hill a little farther to where Papa was working on a new painting. If she didn’t fetch him sometimes, he’d forget we were having dinner or that he hadn’t eaten.

  With Yvon going off in one direction and she in another, I felt a little lost. What was Mama saying? It was as if suddenly we were all strangers, as if the family everyone thought was picture-perfect had become shadows afraid of the coming sunlight.

  It was more like I had just stepped out of our comfortable, beautiful world and did what Yvon always advised me to avoid doing, step into one of those clouds of secrets.

  In my heart I knew there would be more.

  And it would make everything that had come before it an easily forgotten dream.

  2

  Winter was losing its grip on us. I could feel spring touching us with the tips of its fingers. I looked forward to the first of June because it was my birthday, and the older I became, the closer I felt to Yvon. I knew it was silly to think of this because he wasn’t standing still. He was getting older, too, and the year and two months between us would never shorten. It was just a feeling I had, a belief that the more mature Yvon considered me, the more he would love me, because it was an adult loving an adult and not an adult loving a child, which was expected. To me, adult love had more meaning, especially when it was earned. There were so many kinds
of love. Both Mama and Papa had taught me that.

  Love that was expected because you were related was taken for granted, even though we heard stories about brothers fighting over land, even killing each other over it. Sons grew up hating fathers. Mothers disowned daughters. Grandparents disowned entire families. It was obvious that love in any form was a fragile thing.

  I wanted that to never be true about the love I had for Yvon and the love he had for me. I sensed that the more he respected me, the more he would love me, and although he acted as though any show of affection on my part toward him was embarrassing, I also sensed a deep pleasure in him because of how much I adored him. Perhaps he felt he had to keep such happiness his secret so he would look more manly. I never made fun of him or teased him about the way he avoided a touch or a kiss. There was no need for either of us to reassure the other, however. Everything really meaningful that we said to each other we seemed to say with our eyes, which were the same color.

  Truthfully, there were never any deep or lasting silences between us because of something nasty either of us had said to the other. Most of my girlfriends and, from what I overheard, Yvon’s friends couldn’t make the same claim about their siblings. We saw so much rivalry and jealousy. However, whatever he accomplished or I accomplished we both joyfully celebrated together.

  At the moment, both Yvon and I were very excited for Papa. Only a week after he had completed it, Papa sold his new landscape to the captain of a Norwegian merchant ship that had docked after unloading its cargo at the port. Captain Bernt did not bicker about the price. I was secretly hoping Papa would never sell it and we would have it hung on our living-room wall. He had spent weeks on it, driving Mama to an abandoned farm he had discovered on one of his exploratory rides in his red roadster and having her pose for his composition.

  Captain Bernt told Monsieur Passard that the farmhouse was eerily identical to the farmhouse in which he had grown up. But he also admitted that it was Mama in the foreground drawing a pail of water from the fieldstone well that gave the picture its special beauty. Somehow Papa had captured her years younger. She looked closer to my age. It precipitated my asking him if he had known her that young and if that was the way he was seeing her at the time he painted it.

  We were walking home. I had accompanied him to the gallery to meet Captain Bernt, a man in his late forties, if not in his fifties, whose full beard was almost all gray. He was very nice and very honored to meet Papa. He looked at the picture and then at me and asked if I was the woman in the painting.

  “No, no, her mother,” Papa told him. “She is the woman in all my works. This is our daughter.”

  “Your wife is the one in the painting?” He looked at me suspiciously.

  “Yes,” Papa said firmly.

  I was beaming at having been mistaken for her.

  “They must be like twins,” the captain said.

  Yvon was at work, and Mama was making a special dinner and cake to celebrate the picture sale. We hadn’t driven down in the roadster. It wasn’t far from our house, and Mama had been teasing Papa lately about getting a pouch for a stomach. She told him he was driving the vehicle so much that he wasn’t getting enough exercise. She threatened to stop making what had become her famous madeleines. As a joke, he got down on his knees and begged and then promised he would not drive to any place that was less than two kilometers away. “Three,” she countered, and he agreed.

  “She’ll always be that young to me,” he replied to my question as we walked home.

  “But she’s not always that young-looking in other pictures that you’ve painted with her in them,” I said. “The captain really thought I was Mama. I’ve never heard anyone look at any other of your paintings and say that.”

  He looked at me askance, with a strange guilty expression, and continued walking silently.

  “Why did she come out so much younger-looking in this one, Papa? Why not in the others?”

  “It’s a mystery,” he said, and flashed a smile. He loved keeping his artistic achievements cryptic, making it seem as if something truly spiritual had occurred, something he really couldn’t explain himself. But, I thought, this time he was really trying to avoid my question for other reasons. When you grow older, the well of suspicions grows, too. Distrust is something you learn. Monsieur Appert would often tell me we are in the Garden of Eden when we are children, and as we grow, we inherit and see a sea of sins. “Thanks to Eve, of course.”

  “Neither of you ever say how old you were when you met,” I added. “All either of you say is ‘old enough.’ What’s old enough?”

  He smiled again. I breathed relief. At least he wasn’t getting angry at me for interrogating him, which was what he often called it when I asked a question after an answer to the previous one. Why was there always this tension between us when we asked about or referred to their lives before they had come to France?

  “When you fall in love with someone, Marlena, you can never erase how they looked to you at that moment. Maybe it’s special for me because I’m an artist and the visual is my life, but if you ask your mother, she’ll probably tell you that is how she sees me all the time, too, the way we were.” He smiled. “People who are truly in love with each other never age in each other’s eyes.”

  “So she was that young when you first met?”

  “To me she was.”

  “When?” I persisted.

  He laughed. “How old am I?” he asked.

  “Thirty-seven.”

  “How old is Yvon?”

  “Sixteen.”

  “Use math.”

  “But I don’t know how long you knew each other before you decided to come to France and get married. Not exactly, anyway.”

  “Less than a year,” he said sharply. “Okay? Enough about that.”

  He walked faster.

  I had never been stung by a bee, but I imagined how I felt at the moment was how I would feel if it had happened. I hurried to catch up. Something had broken free inside me when the ship’s captain wondered if I was the woman in the painting. Questions bottled up for years were pouring over my tongue whether I liked it or not.

  “Why didn’t you stay in America? Wasn’t it better for making money on your work?”

  He looked at me and continued to walk. I thought he wasn’t going to answer.

  “I told you that Jean-Paul trained me in doing portraits to make money. We had met by chance. He saw me drawing funny images of people on the boardwalk in New York City, caricatures. You know, like cartoons. It was an easy way to make money to live, and he stood there watching me work. Then he suggested I should do more sophisticated art and invited me to his apartment to see his work. It was all landscapes, but he said he had done portraits to earn a living first, to be able to eat. So I followed his lead, his training, learning how to paint someone and make him or her look better, more handsome, prettier than they were.”

  “Why prettier or more handsome?”

  “Anyone who wants his or her portrait done is somewhat vain, so you flatter them. Okay?”

  “But why not stay in America to do the landscapes?” I asked, rushing the question because we were almost home. “There are beautiful places to paint, I’m sure.”

  “Jean-Paul convinced me that people loved art more here. The greatest artists are from Europe, and artists here have been doing it a lot longer, even though there are some great ones in America. I didn’t think we’d stay for the rest of our lives, but…” He paused and looked back at the sea. “We fell in love again, this time with this place.” He smiled. “Lucky you, right?”

  “Oh, yes,” I said.

  “So stop asking questions as if you’re upset about it,” he added, unexpectedly roughly.

  Was that how I sounded?

  “I’m not!” I cried, but he was already yards ahead and almost to the front door.

  At least I had learned something, I thought, and later, when Yvon was home from work, I told him about my conversation with Papa. He look
ed almost as suspicious as Papa had when I asked the first question.

  “Did he tell you where exactly or how exactly he had met Mama?”

  “I didn’t get to that. He answered quickly and walked fast, but Mama once told us they had met when she had visited an aunt in Charlottesville, Virginia, right?”

  “Uh-huh,” Yvon said, his eyes shifting from mine.

  “He was visiting his cousin. The one who left him some money.”

  “Right,” Yvon said.

  “So it couldn’t have been in New York City. Did he ever tell you anything different?”

  “No.”

  “Did he tell you something he never told me?”

  “No, Marlena. Don’t be a woodpecker.”

  “What?”

  “I have to wash up for dinner. We’re opening a new bottle of wine to celebrate Papa’s sale tonight as well,” he said, smiling.

  I wasn’t sure who was better at changing the topic, Yvon or Papa or Mama. I was about to shout after him, cry out, You know more than you’re telling me, Yvon Hunter! but I stopped myself when Mama appeared and asked me to help her set the table. Jean-Paul’s woman friend, Anne Bise, had already arrived. Papa had gone to pick up Jean-Paul in the roadster.

  “I have a roast, and I want you to help with the mashed potatoes and then help set the table,” she said. “What was the captain of the ship like?”

  “He was very nice.” I thought a moment and then quickly said, “He thought I was the one in the picture.”

  “Did he?” She ran her hand over my hair, smiling. “You are getting very pretty and growing so quickly, I can see him thinking you were older.”

  “It’s not because I’m getting older.”

  “What?” She tilted her head. “What do you mean?”

  “I thought Papa had painted you looking younger in the picture,” I said. “He admitted it,” I quickly added so she couldn’t deny it.

  “Did he?” She held her smile, but she looked nervous. I could see it in her eyes.

  “Did he draw a funny image of you on the sidewalk in Charlottesville? Is that how you met?”