The Swan Thieves

Ingrid was born on February 22 at the birth clinic in Greenhill. Nothing ever dims that moment for me, when I realized she was alive and well--exquisite, in fact--or the later moment when I found her hand wrapped in a knot around my finger. And I had not been killed by my ride through flame. Robert stood touching her, the tip of his own finger nearly as big as her nose. I was crying, too, it turned out, and when I looked at Robert I felt a love for him so radiant that I had to avert my eyes from his face, which shone like a gilded ring. I hadn't understood before what it meant to be in love--I couldn't choose which of these two people, the very small or the towering, I loved more. Why had I never noticed Robert's divinity, reproduced now in the tiny head that lay on my skin, the hazel eyes gazing around with such disbelief?

We named her for my long-dead grandmother from Philadelphia. Ingrid was a reasonably good sleeper, and our pattern continued after that first night. Robert and Ingrid slept, and I lay watching them, or reading, or walked around the house, or cleaned the bathroom, or slept with them. Robert seemed too tired to stay up painting--the baby woke us three times every night, which was nothing, I assured him, and he found that exhausting. I offered to let him nurse her, and he laughed sleepily and said that he would if he could, but he thought his milk wouldn't taste good even if he could produce any. "Too many toxins," he said. "All that paint."

I felt a twinge of annoyance that could have been jealousy-- did I hear self-congratulation in his tone? There wasn't any paint in my bloodstream, only healthy foods and the postnatal vitamins

I still felt we couldn't afford but didn't want to deny the baby. That feeling I'd had of love, almost worship, for Robert in the delivery room had slipped away from day to day, fading with the soreness in my stomach and leg muscles, and I'd watched it go, conscious of the loss. It was like the visible end of a teenage crush but far sadder, and it left a gap because now I knew what I'd been capable of feeling, not at fifteen but at past thirty, and it was gone, gone. But I watched Robert holding the baby in the crook of his arm, rather expertly now, and eating with his other hand, and I loved them both--Ingrid was just beginning to turn her head to look up at him, and her eyes were full of the surprise I had always felt myself at the sight of this monumental man with his angular face and heavy, curling hair.

I didn't ask much of Robert at home. He was teaching the early-summer session to bring in some extra money, and I was grateful. After a while, he began to paint late in the attic again, and sometimes he stayed overnight at the school studio. He didn't seem to sleep during the day anymore, at least not that I knew of, despite our night wakefulness with Ingrid. He showed me a small canvas or two, still lifes with sticks and rocks he'd been setting for the students and trying himself, and I smiled and refrained from remarking that to me they seemed dead. Nature morte --they reminded me of the French term. A few years before I might have argued with him about them, goaded him a little, debated with him because he liked that kind of attention, told him he lacked only a limp pheasant to complete his canvases. Now, I saw our bread and butter in them rather than just the wood and stones, and I held my tongue. Ingrid needed baby food, preferably organic carrots and spinach, and eventually she might want to go to Barnard, and my only pair of pajamas had worn through the knee the week before.

One morning in June after Robert had left for his class, I decided to go into town to do some unnecessary errands, mainly to break my routine of walks with the stroller around campus. I got Ingrid ready and set her in her crib to play for a few minutes while I collected sweater, car keys, purse. My keys were missing from their hook by the back door, and I knew at once that Robert must have taken them while I was finishing breakfast. Occasionally he drove down to his classes if he was running very late, and he seldom knew where his own keys were. Annoyance rose in me like heat.

As a last resort, I mounted the attic stairs to see if Robert's keys might be in the pile of personal effects on his table, which was often a still life of crumpled paper, pens, cafeteria napkins, phone cards, and even money. I was so intent on my search that I didn't understand at first what I was seeing--I was still looking toward the messy table, the hope of my keys, my outing, as sight registered in the soft gloom. Then I pulled the light string, slowly. It had been a couple of months since I'd been all the way up here, I realized, perhaps even the four months since Ingrid's birth. It was an old house, rustic, as I've mentioned. The underside of the roof was unfinished, the beams and roof slats exposed; the attic ran the short length of the house and was an inferno on hot days, which were fortunately few in the mountains. I glanced hopelessly away, toward the table where the familiar pile of junk lay, then looked around again.

I can't really describe my first impression, except that it had made me give a little scream out loud before I could stop myself, because it was a vision of a woman everywhere, a woman spread across the surfaces of the attic in small parts and versions, repetitions--dissected, cut into pieces, although without blood. Her face I knew already, and I saw it dozens of times around the room, smiling, serious, painted in different sizes and different moods. Sometimes she wore her hair piled up on her head, sometimes with a red ribbon in it, or a dark hat or bonnet, or a low-cut dress, or her hair down and her breasts bare, which gave me a further shock. Sometimes it was a hand by itself with small gold rings on it, or an old-fashioned high-buttoned shoe, or even just a study of a single finger, a bare foot, or, to my horror, a puckering nipple meticulously delineated, a curve of naked back or shoulder or buttock, a deep shadow of hair between spread thighs, and then--even more startling by contrast--a neatly buttoned glove, the somber black bodice of a dress, a hand holding a fan or a bouquet of flowers, a body cloaked and mysterious, and then her face again, in profile, three-quarters, full-face, dark-eyed, sorrowful.

The wood he'd painted on had been sanded smooth--the attic was unfinished but not rough--so that he'd been able to put in fine detail. He had covered the background of this collage with a soft gray-blue and worked in borders of spring flowers, less sharply realistic than all the scattered images of the woman but exquisitely recognizable--roses, apple blossoms, wisteria--flowers we had here on the college grounds, in fact, and which Robert and I both loved. The beams were ornamented with long twisted ribbons of red and blue, a trompe-l'oeil effect that reminded me of wallpaper in Victorian bedrooms.

The two shortest attic walls were given to landscapes, painted freely enough to be called a tribute to Impressionism, with the same lady appearing in each. One showed a beach, with high cliffs rising up on the left side. She stood alone, at a distance, staring out to the sea. She had a parasol over her shoulder and a flower-laden blue hat on her head, and yet she had to shade her eyes--the sun was dazzling on the water. The other landscape was of a meadow, floating with spots of color that must have been summer flowers, and she half lay in the tall grass reading a book, her parasol propped above her and the glow from her pink-patterned dress reflected off her lovely face. This time, to my surprise, there was a child next to her, a little girl perhaps three or four years old, picking at the tops of flowers, and I wondered immediately if this variation had been inspired by Ingrid's presence in our lives. It brought a slight unclenching of my heart.

I sat down in Robert's creaking desk chair. I was sharply aware, especially as I looked at the little girl in the meadow, with her dress and hat and cloud of curly dark hair, that I must not leave Ingrid awake and alone in her crib below much longer. There was one bare corner still, one slanting area of the ceiling that Robert had not yet covered. The rest was filled, bursting, ripe with color and beauty, overflowing with the presence of this woman. The partly finished canvases on Robert's easels also depicted her: in one, she sat shrouded in dark fabric he had only half painted--a cloak, a shawl--her face shadowed, her eyes full of--what? Love? Dread? She gazed at me, and I looked away. The other canvas was even more frightening. It showed her face next to another face, that of a dead woman who lay limp against her shoulder. The dead woman had gray hair, a similar studio costume, a red wound in the center of her forehead--one dark hole, deep, small, somehow more gruesome than any gory gash could have been. That was the first time I saw that image.

I sat there for another long minute. Attic, canvases--I knew it was the best work from his brush I'd ever encountered. It was transcendent, focused, but the effect was also of a passion filled to bursting, a wild attempt at containment. It had taken days, nights, weeks, probably months. I thought of the purple crescents under Robert's eyes, the way the skin on his cheeks and forehead was beginning to crease with strain. He had told me a couple of times how full of purpose he felt, how he wanted only to paint and paint and didn't seem to need sleep these days, and I had been envious--I felt half asleep all day, after nursing Ingrid at night. We could not sell the attic, with its overwhelming decoration, although perhaps he could show the two paintings. In fact, I prayed no one else would ever see this appalling extravaganza. How could we explain it to the college? No, he would have to paint over the whole thing someday, certainly before we ever left the place. The thought of blotting out all that overflowing, radiant work hurt my stomach. No one else would ever understand it.

Worst of all, whoever she was, she was not me. And she had a child, apparently, with curly dark hair like Ingrid's. Robert's hair--inherited? It was unreasonable, a ridiculous thought. I was more exhausted than I'd realized. After all, the woman herself had curly dark hair, rather like Robert's own. An even worse possibility occurred to me. Perhaps Robert somehow wished he was this woman--perhaps this was a portrait of himself as the woman he wanted to be. What did I know about my husband, really? But Robert was and had always been so hugely male that I couldn't believe this hypothesis for more than a second. I didn't know which alarmed me more--the unrelenting work that filled nearly every square inch of all that space closing in on me, or the fact that he had never talked with me voluntarily about the woman who dominated his days.

I got up and made a quick search of the room, my hands trembling as I shook out the blankets on the sofa where Robert apparently no longer slept much. What did I expect to find there? There was no other woman sleeping with him, at least not in my house. No love letter fell out--nothing but Robert's watch, which he'd been looking for. I rummaged through the pile on the table, the papers--sketches, some of them, for the portraits and borders around me. I did come upon his keys on the ring with the brass coins I'd given him a few years before. I put them in my jeans pocket.

By the sofa were several stacks of library books, slipping into an avalanche, mainly large art books. He was always bringing books and photographs into the house, so this, at least, was no surprise. But there were so many of them now, and almost all of them chronicled French Impressionism, something I hadn't known him to find this compelling, apart from his preoccupation with Degas when we were living in New York. There were books on the movement's great artists and their predecessors--Manet, Boudin, Courbet, Corot. Some had been borrowed from distant universities. There were also books about the history of Paris, books about the coast of Normandy, books about Monet's gardens at Giverny, about nineteenth-century women's clothing, about the

Paris Commune, about the emperor Louis-Napoleon, the reshaping of Paris by Baron Haussmann, the Paris Opera, French chateaus and hunting, ladies' fans and bouquets in the history of painting. Why had Robert never discussed these interests with me? When had all these books crept into our house? Had he read all of them simply to decorate an attic? Robert was no historian--as far as I knew, he read art catalogs and the occasional crime novel.

I sat holding a biography of Mary Cassatt. This must all be for his show, somehow, some inspiration, some project he had neglected to tell me about. Had I been busy with the baby and neglected to ask? Or was this project so entwined with his feelings about the model he had never mentioned that he couldn't bring himself to talk with me about it? I looked around the attic again, at the tidal wave of images, splintered pieces of a mirror held up to one striking woman. He had dressed her meticulously in the fashions from these books--shoe, glove, ruffled white undergarments. But to him she was clearly a real person, a living part of his life. I heard Ingrid's wail and realized that only a few minutes had elapsed since I'd mounted the stairs to the attic, the brief passage of a nightmare.

Ingrid and I drove to town, and I pushed her stroller around among the retirees and tourists and people on lunch break. At the library, I checked out Where the Wild Things Are for her so that I could have the pleasure of reading it aloud--the cover made me feel like a child again every time I saw it. I checked out a biography of Van Gogh that was on display. It was time for me to go on with my education, and I didn't know anything about him except the public legends. I bought a summer dress at one of the boutiques. At least it was on sale, violets on cream-colored cotton, old-fashioned, unlike my usual jeans and solid-colored T-shirts. I thought of asking Robert to paint me in it on our porch, or in the meadow behind the faculty houses, and then had to struggle not to remember the dark-haired child on his attic wall. "Anything else for you today?" the clerk asked me, wrapping up a couple of free sticks of incense to put in the bag.

"No, no, thanks. That's all I need." I straightened Ingrid in her stroller because bending over helped control the prickling behind my eyes.

December 22, 1877

Mon cher oncle et ami:

Thank you for your lovely note, which I hardly deserve but will treasure whenever my small attempts at work need encouragement. A gray day indeed, and I thought I might beguile a little of it by writing you. We expect you, of course, on Christmas, and will look forward to that, whichever day or hour you can come in, and Yves hopes to return for several days then, although his having a reprieve for a longer holiday is far from certain, and he will have to go back to the South to finish his work in the New Year. I think we shall celebrate rather soberly; Papa has a cold again--nothing alarming, I assure you, but he tires easily and his eyes are more painful than usual. I have helped him lie down in his sitting room with warm compresses just now, and when I last glanced in, the fire was cozy and he had fallen asleep. I am a little tired today myself, and can't settle down to anything but letter writing, although my painting went well yesterday because I have found a good model, Esme, another of my maids; she once told me, shyly, when I asked her whether she knows your own beloved Louveciennes, that hers is the very next village, called Gremiere. Yves says I shouldn't torment the servants by making them sit for me, but where else could I find such a patient model? Today, however, she is out on errands and I must listen for Papa while I sit to write you.

You, who have seen my studio, know that it contains not only easel and worktable but also this desk, which I have had since childhood; it belonged to my mother, who painted its panels herself. I always do my correspondence here, looking out the window. You can picture, I'm sure, how sodden the garden is this morning -- I can hardly believe it the same little paradise where I painted several scenes last summer. But it is beautiful even now, if stark. Imagine this garden, my winter consolation, mon ami -- imagine it for me, if you will.

With affection,

Beatrice de Clerval