At the Edge of Summer

I didn’t recognize Madame Ross in the painting, though the one time I’d met her, more than a decade before, she’d worn a hat and considerably more clothing. I could see the resemblance to Clare in the tilt of her chin and the steady gray eyes. Clare’s hair was that same deep auburn. And those long fingers, wrapped around the handle of a fan in the painting, they looked like the very ones holding the frame. Which, I noticed, were white-knuckled, indeed.

“Monsieur, are you quite finished?”

I looked up to see her mouth drawn in a tight line. “Finished?”

“Ogling my mother. Are you finished?”

“I wasn’t ogling, mademoiselle,” I said quickly. “I was comparing the resemblance.”

I instantly knew it wasn’t the right thing to say. Two spots of color appeared high in her cheeks and I could feel my own following suit.

“In the face.” I said it perhaps too loudly. “In the face only. I was looking nowhere else.” But of course, saying that made my gaze go right to Madame Ross’s nibards. She had a small mole on the left one.

“Monsieur!” she exclaimed.

I covered my eyes. “Mon Dieu, put it away.”

“Why did she…why is it…here in your father’s studio….”

“Well, it’s one of his works,” I offered helpfully, peeking out from between my fingers. “See? His initials are right there in the middle, painted over her—”

“I know where they’re painted,” she said, face flaming.

“It’s really quite clever, how he’s incorporated the two Cs right into her—”

She cleared her throat pointedly.

“Pardon.”

“But why?” she wailed. “Why on earth did he paint my mother in…such a state?”

“And why did she pose in…such a state?”

Clare refused to answer that.

“Are you so sure it’s accurate? That he didn’t just paint her face and then, well, imagine the rest?” I uncovered my eyes. “Now right here…does your mother really have a—”

“Luc René Rieulle Crépet!” She flipped the painting around, away from my view.

“You’ve remembered my full name.”

“And you’ve forgotten your manners.” She glared at me over the top of the frame. “It’s my mother you’re talking about.”

“Pardon, mademoiselle.” I went to close up the supply cabinet, trying very hard not to think of nibards.

When we left the studio, Clare kept her eyes fixed on the hallway rug.

“Papa has painted me before.” I tried to sound reassuring. “Many times.”

“And your mother. Many, many times. Once with a butter churn.”

I made another attempt. “They were good friends, our parents.”

She sped up, still refusing to look at me. “Better friends than I thought.”

I stopped walking. Thankfully, so did she. “I’m not very good at this.”

She turned.

“I’m not very good at knowing the right thing to say.”

“I’m not either.” She pressed her hands to the front of her skirt. I realized that she’d left her sketch pad back in the studio.

“I wouldn’t worry too much about it.” I took a step closer. “Papa, he paints all sorts of things. Not all of it means something.”

“Did you not listen to a word I said in there earlier? About art being honest, meaningful expression?”

“But you’re wrong. Not all of it means something,” I repeated. “You need to see Hat Rack, with Cat.”

“I’m sorry?”

“Follow me.”

Hat Rack, with Cat, was Papa’s very first painting, at least the very first that he allowed Maman to frame and hang on the wall. It was tucked away down at the end of the west hallway, next to the blue powder room that no one ever used. I took Clare there and waited with crossed arms while she puzzled over it.

It was, literally, what it claimed to be. A striped tabby draped on the top of a nearly empty hat rack. Only a singular top hat, shiny and bent, hung from a peg. The painting bore none of the angularity that marked Papa’s later illustrations, but it played with color, like a Matisse. The cat’s whiskers were lined in blue, the old top hat shadowed in green. Come to think of it, it might have been the same hat Clare had tried on in the studio.

“It’s about the weariness of familiarity,” Clare said finally. It sounded like the thing an art student would parrot.

“Isn’t it just a cat?”

“Is a cat ever just a cat?” She threaded her fingers behind her back and paced, the way Papa always did before a painting. “Is not a cat sometimes a…a…” She gave the cat an accusatory stare. “Goodness, what else could it be?”

“Friendship.” I straightened the frame. “At least that’s what Papa always said.”

“Friendship?” She took a step closer. “Well, the cat, he’s a Manx cat. See here?”

“So? Papa’s never been to the Isle of Man.”

“Beneath the cat’s paw is a herring.”

“Herring?” I bent. “There is?” I’d walked by the painting hundreds of times and never noticed the gray herring between the claws. “Papa’s never been to Man, but he had a friend from there. Used to visit in the summers nearby when they were boys. I don’t know his real name, because Papa always called him ‘Herring.’ ”

“Ah-ha!” She nodded, satisfied. “And the hat rack?”

“Herring wanted to be a milliner? I don’t know.”

“He wanted to be great.” She snapped her fingers. “He wanted to be on top.” I was skeptical, but she was delighted. “You’re wrong. It is more than a cat. It’s a story of boyhood dreams.” She waited a moment before adding, “Told you.”

Though I thought she was ridiculous, I brought her to Eleven Apples, a still life of eleven apples, carefully arranged in a pyramid atop a gleaming plate. “Surely this speaks to him balancing his career and his family,” she said. I showed her The Ribbon, a rosy ribbon curled on top of a scarred wooden table, with a tight knot right in the middle. “This must be when he met your mother. Lovely, yet strong right at her core.” With Cheese Pots, Unguarded, a painting with two open crocks of the soft cheese eaten in Picardy, she said, “He was feeling nostalgic, missing Picardy all the way from Glasgow. And he felt vulnerable because of it.”

Those paintings of Papa’s lining the walls of the château had always been just that to me. Still lifes, landscapes, illustrations, the occasional portrait. But Clare, she found a story in each.

She’d stand before one, hands locked behind her back or thoughtfully stroking her chin, and weave thoughts, emotions, adventures for poor Papa. “Really, they’re like the pages of a diary,” she said, “spread all over the house.”

His early still lifes, down the west hallway, morphed into his illustrations, framed and hanging in places of prominence in the front of the house. Those defiant, forbidding, arresting paintings in the Glasgow School style, all sharp lines and murky colors. Truth be told, those paintings terrified me as a child. Evil queens, stubborn princesses, unflinching knights. Bluebeard’s wife, holding a bloody key aloft. Little Red Cap caught beneath the jaws of the wolf. Sleeping Beauty, twined with roses, but with an ogre’s eyes glowing beneath the bed. I used to run down the front hall with hands to the sides of my eyes, like horse blinders. I didn’t want to catch a glimpse before bedtime.

As though reading my mind, Clare said, “I used to think they were frightening. Perrault’s fairy tales, that is. And your father’s illustrations fit them so well.”

“He painted other fairy tales too. Not as part of a commission, but just because he liked them. Snow White and Rose Red, battling the wily dwarf. Trusty John, turning to stone. Rapunzel, wandering alone in the wilderness.”

“I like this one.” Clare touched a frame. A girl, red curls resting on a pumpkin, lay in front of a smoldering fireplace.

“Cinderella. He mixed soot in his paint to get the texture exactly right.”

“It’s not that.” She sighed. “She looks so lonely.”

A nearly orphaned girl, sleeping in a borrowed place.

“She wasn’t completely alone.” I reached past and pointed to the mice and crickets tucked into the corners of the painted kitchen, the starlings peering through the window, the lean dog nestled against Cinderella’s bare feet. “There are always friends if you look.”

She turned and peeked up through her eyelashes. My face suddenly grew far too warm.

“My favorite,” I said, clearing my throat, “is the queen from Rumpelstiltskin, sitting on her throne, her spinning wheel in the background. He borrowed a spinning wheel from Marthe’s mother and stood it in the corner of the studio for ages while he painted. I played with it until I accidentally ‘pricked my finger.’ It was only a splinter, but I didn’t know that. Maman found me lying in the rose garden, convinced I was doomed to sleep for a hundred years.”

“And when you awoke, did you find true love?”

It was a silly question, tossed off over her shoulder. There had been adolescent kisses in country lanes, infatuations with cabaret dancers, and an earnest crush on my uncle’s long-legged mistress, Véronique. But no love. I barely had time enough for tennis.

She noticed I’d stopped. “As for me, I don’t think it exists. True love. It’s as make-believe as a magical spindle.”

“I’m French. We’re supposed to believe that one can fall in love once a week.”

“Then why haven’t you?”

Something in her question was expectant. An expectancy that surprised me, given that this was only our second real conversation. Clare Ross, when she gave her trust and her friendship, gave it completely.

But I evaded. “If you see how my maman used to dress me, you’ll understand why I’ve never inspired a great passion in any girl.”

I took her to see the few portraits in the east hallway. She followed the string of Lucs down the hall—a fat-cheeked baby clinging to the back rail of a chair; a scowling boy in a hated lace-collared blouse and long curls; a boy, prouder and freshly shorn, posing with a tennis racket and a smile. She laughed at each one and I blushed.

“They’re not very good,” I mumbled. “I didn’t really have hair as long as that.”

“Pity,” she said, with a glint in her eye. “I think the curls are rather fetching.”

I refused to answer.

“It’s interesting, though, how even the portraits of you contain so much more than your face.”

“My tennis racket, of course. And in that one, my rocking horse. He put my favorite things in the paintings.”

She stepped closer to the one of me scowling at the painter. I was almost seven in the picture, furious to be sitting in a moth-eaten ruffled blouse rather than off meeting other boys. At seven, I was sure I was missing out on some vital part of manhood, both in the outfit and in the time spent sitting still.

“There’s more. Right there, around your wrist. A ribbon? And what are you holding clutched in your fist? I can just see the gleam of something.”

“Marbles,” I said. I hadn’t even noticed Papa painting them in. “That summer, I was mad about marbles. We all were. Marthe’s oldest son, Alain, would tag along with her and we’d play in the dirt outside the kitchen door. Our playing was fierce.”

“And the ribbon?” She touched the painting, where my wrist stuck out from the end of my jacket. “Or was it a bracelet?”

“A ribbon.” I yanked my sleeve down as though she’d really touched me. “That was the summer Maman left us.” I shrugged, hoping I looked nonchalant, as though I still didn’t think of it now and again. “She and Papa, they’d had a terrific fight and she went to my grandparents’ in Perthshire. I snuck into her wardrobe and pulled a ribbon from her dressing gown. Wore it around my wrist under my shirt all summer. I missed her.”

I didn’t tell Clare how the fight was all my fault.

That spring, Papa had just got his commission for Les Contes de Ma Mère l’Oye. He’d spend all day in the tumble-down chapel courtyard, sketching remnants of knights and ladies pressed into the stained glass, while I ran from one corner to the other with a makeshift sword, hunting for trolls and monsters. He’d be so wrapped up in his studies that he wouldn’t even come for his midday potage. Maman worried and buzzed around him, bringing coffee and sandwiches, keeping his pencils sharpened, making sure the gardener didn’t touch a blade in the courtyard. Even though she was halfway through a marble bust, she put aside her own work—her chisels and mallets and rasps—to concentrate on his.

It was one afternoon, where early violets were pushing up along the edges of the shadows, that Papa became frustrated. He was starting in on the first canvas. There was nothing in the middle but a few faint lines and whorls, measured out with his thumb, but I trusted him. Tomorrow those scattered lines would be something wonderful—a princess or a lion or a castle arching to the sky. But at the moment, Papa slumped in his chair, glaring at the canvas.

“Papa, why have you stopped drawing?” I asked. I was crouched by a hole with my wooden sword, harrying the snake inside. “What’s the matter?” In truth, he hadn’t been drawing all morning.

He muttered an incomprehensible string of something. When he wanted to swear at a canvas, he did it in English.

I shrugged. In the end, the snake hole was more interesting than grown-up words. “You should ask Maman,” I said. After all, it’s what I always did when I had a problem. “She can help.”

But Papa waved his hand dismissively. “She wouldn’t know. This is a question of art. It is not for her to understand.”

Later I went to find Maman, to show her a newly wobbly tooth and to tell her about the snake’s valiant escape. She sat in her studio, high up in the east tower, which, gradually, was becoming less and less of a studio. The piles of unsold sculptures that usually lined the walls were gone, tucked away somewhere in the château. Her old, scarred worktable had been moved against the wall and covered with a green blotting pad. She sat at the improvised desk with her book of household accounts, adding up columns of figures. A stack of letters sat in the corner, awaiting Papa’s signature.

She pressed a kiss to my forehead but shooed me away. “Maman is working, mon poulet.”

I stepped away, kicking the edge of the rug. It covered up the chips of stone that had always littered the floor before. “I’m sorry you aren’t an artist any longer.”

“Of course I am.” She licked a finger and turned a page in her ledger. “I’m just busy with other things today.”

“I don’t think so.” I wiggled my tooth. “Papa said that you aren’t. He said that you don’t understand art the way he does.”

The row that followed, out in the chapel courtyard, shook down three panes of stained glass. The next morning Maman was gone.

I moped around that summer, hiding in her wardrobe and hoarding marbles. I suppose Papa was moping, too, though he was always at his easel. He painted in nothing but blues and blacks. I learned later that he’d been writing her letter after letter, pleading in English for her to come back to him. She resolutely stayed in Perthshire at her parents’ house.

Since the whole mess was exactly my fault, I knew I had to be the one to fix it. It could be a quest, like Sir Gawain, I decided. I was old enough to be a hero. With Maman’s sewing scissors, I cut off my long curls and left them on her dressing table as an offering. I found a dented helmet in Papa’s costume box and, armed with my wooden sword and an old palette for a shield, I set off through the woods in the general direction of Scotland.

I didn’t get far before my feet went right out from under me. Deep in the woods, I’d found a well, dry and forgotten beneath the leaves, and I tumbled down.

I was far enough from Mille Mots that Papa couldn’t hear my calls, though I shouted myself hoarse. The stones crumbled back down on top of me when I tried to climb up. The skies darkened and I swore I heard wolves howling. I stayed awake all night, hands crossed over my head, until Alain, checking his snares early in the morning, found me, crying, shivering, and bruised up and down. He brought Papa, who took off his jacket and hauled me up with a rope. I had nothing worse than a broken ankle, but Maman was on the next boat. Papa spent two days filling in that well himself and was once more her cher Claude. I never did set off on a quest again.

I didn’t tell Clare all of this, as we stood in the hallway in front of Papa’s portraits. She’d noticed the faded ribbon around my wrist in the painting and that made me feel vulnerable enough.

I think she knew that. She didn’t say anything, didn’t touch the painting again, but she moved very close, so close I could hear her breathing.

“Maman came back, though,” I said without thinking, then felt awful for saying so. Because for Clare, her mother hadn’t.

Her face was closed. “You must have needed her so much, she felt it across the miles.” She tipped her chin up at the portrait. “The way you kept that ribbon close, so close that you forgot all about it while you posed.”

“I didn’t know Papa saw all of that.” The ribbon, the marbles, the boy frustrated that his maman had disappeared.

“I told you that art is more than circles and lines. More than branches and fruit and piles of stone. It can tell a story.”

“Then what is your story?” I asked.

“Maybe not so different than the one your father captured here. Though instead of a ribbon, I have a green dress.”

The one she was wearing now, far too elegant for a fifteen-year-old girl. It had been her mother’s, I knew now.

She turned serious eyes to me. “Luc,” she said, and I realized it was the first time she’d called me by my first name. “Do you think she’ll return?”

“What?”

“You wished as hard as you could, and your mother returned for you.” Her eyes glistened, but I knew she wouldn’t cry. “Do you think mine will? Will she come for me here?”

I knew Maman had been writing to friends, to colleagues, to old classmates from the School of Art, seeing if anyone had an address for Maud Ross. “Not a word from her,” I overheard Maman say to Papa. “What are we to think?”

I wished I could tell Clare that everything would be fine, that her mother was safe and near and missing her madly. “Mademoiselle,” I said. “Clare.” Her eyes flickered, and I knew it was the first time I’d used her name, too. “She left home to draw her story. All you can do is draw your own and hope that she sees it one day.”

She swallowed a sigh, but she nodded.

“But don’t wait for that. Don’t wait for her or for anyone to see what you’ve created.” Papa had always been too expectant of critics, and Maman too shattered by indifference. “Draw it for you. Draw it because it’s your Something Important.”

“Something Important? I’m not sure I’ll ever find that.” She rubbed at a smudge of pencil on the side of her hand. “Why do we choose to draw what we draw?” she asked. I wasn’t sure she wanted an answer. “Aren’t they the things that speak to our heart?”

Once I thought it was nothing but tennis that spoke to my heart. But standing in the east hallway, with Clare standing in front of me, waiting, I wasn’t so sure. I pressed my pocket, where I had the Conté crayons wrapped in the handkerchief. My fingers itched to trace her face. “I think they must be.”