The Swan Thieves

We got to our feet at once, but Caillet did not take us directly to Beatrice's work. Instead, he gave us a tour, the lingering tour of the collector who loves his paintings and introduces them as if they are people. There was a small canvas by Sisley, dated 1894--which he'd bought in Aries, he said, for nothing, because he had been the first to authenticate it. There were two canvases by Mary Cassatt, of women reading, and a pastel landscape on brown paper by Berthe Morisot, five strokes of green, four of blue, a dash of yellow. Mary liked that one best: "It's so simple. And perfect." And there was an Impressionist landscape of such beauty that we both paused in front of it--a castle rising out of heavy greenery, palms, golden light.

"That is Majorca." Caillet pointed with a blunt finger. "My mother's mother lived there, and I used to visit her when I was a child. Her name was Elaine Gurevich. She did not live in the castle, naturally, but we took walks there. It is her painting--she was my first teacher. She adored music, books, art. I would sleep in her bed, and if I woke up at four in the morning she was always reading, with the light on. I loved her more than almost anyone." He turned away. "If only she had painted more. I always felt I was painting for her, a little."

There were twentieth-century works as well -- de Kooning and a small Klee and the abstractions of Pedro Caillet himself, and his brother's. Pedro's work was surprisingly colorful and lively, while Antoine's tended to lines of silver and white.

"My brother is dead," Caillet said flatly. "He died in Mexico City six years ago. He was my greatest friend--we worked together for thirty years. I am more proud of Antoine's work than of my own. He was a deep, reflective person, a marvelous person. His labor inspired me. I am traveling to Rome for an exhibition of his work. That will be my final trip." He smoothed his hair. "When Antoine died, I decided to stop painting. It was cleaner that way, not to go on and on. Sometimes it is better for an artist not to last too long. That means I am no longer a painter. I buried my last painting with him. You know that Renoir had to have his paintbrush tied onto his hand at the end? And Dufy."

This explained the immaculate fingernails, I thought, the perfect blue-and-black clothes, the lack of studio smells. I wished I could ask him what he did with his time now, but the house, as exquisite as its owner, made the answer plain: nothing. He had the air of a man waiting thoughtfully for an appointment, the patient who arrives early in the waiting room and hasn't brought a book or newspaper but disdains to pick up any of those glossy magazines. Doing nothing was apparently a full-time job for Pedro Caillet; he could afford it, and his paintings kept him silent company. It struck me that he had asked us nothing about ourselves, except whether Mary painted self-portraits; he didn't seem to want to know why we were interested in his old friends. He had freed himself even from curiosity.

Now Caillet moved from his cave of a living room through the yellow-and-red doorway to the dining room. Here we saw something different: treasures of Mexican folk art. There was a long green table set around with blue chairs, with a perforated-tin lamp in the shape of a bird hanging over it, and an ancient wooden sideboard, all apparently waiting for no dinner guests. One wall was decorated with an embroidered tapestry, magenta and emerald and orange people and animals going about their business on a black background. The opposite wall displayed (incongruously, I thought) three Impressionist paintings and a more realist portrait in pencil, a woman's head, which looked twentieth-century.

Caillet raised a hand as if to greet them all. "Aude particularly wanted these three oils," he remarked, "so I declined to sell them to her. Otherwise, I was very polite, and I sold her all the others, my whole collection--which was not large, perhaps twelve pieces, since Beatrice did not paint that much."

The paintings were remarkable, even at first glance, evidence of a quietly splendid Impressionist talent. One of them showed a golden-haired girl before a mirror. A maid, shadowy background presence, was bringing her clothes to her, or perhaps taking something out of the room, or perhaps simply watching her; there was something furtive about the more distant figure glimpsed in the mirror, ghostlike. The effect was lovely, sensual, unsettling. I was seeing my first Beatrice de Clerval in the flesh, and in every one of her few works I've seen since then, there was an unease of this sort. In the corner was a strong mark in black, which looked decorative, like a Chinese character, until you deciphered the letters: BdC, a signature.

The largest oil showed a man sitting on a bench in the shade of roughly painted flowering bushes. I thought of the garden in Beatrice's letters and took a step backward to see it in focus, moving carefully so as not to bump the blue chairs. The man wore a hat and an open jacket with a cravat at his neck. He was reading a book. In the foreground were brilliantly vivid flowers, scarlet and yellow and pink, blazing against the green, while the man was a blurred figure, relaxed and stable but far less important to the composition, I thought. Had Beatrice de Clerval found her husband so much less definite a character than her garden, or had she simply shrouded their intimacy in vagueness?

Caillet, on the other side of the table, confirmed some of my guesses. "That one is Beatrice's husband, Yves Vignot, as confirmed by their daughter, Aude. You may know that Aude changed her name from Aude Vignot to Aude de Clerval after her mother died--fanatic loyalty, I suppose, or perhaps she sensed her mother's achievement as an artist and wanted a little of her glory. She was too proud of her mother."

He walked to one end of the dining hall and stood there, contemplating a ceramic duck studded with unlit candles that sat on a perforated-tin cabinet. Mary and I turned to study the third Beatrice de Clerval painting, which showed a pond in a park, its flat surface ruffled by wind that threw the reflections of the arching trees overhead into confusion. This skillful scene was brightened by a flower garden at one end of the pond and the shapes of birds on the water, including a swan just raising its wings for flight. It was a stunning piece of work; I thought to myself that--to my eye, at least--the handling of light on the water approached Monet's. Why would anyone with such a gift ever stop painting? The form of the swan, swiftly brushed in, was the essence of flight, of sudden, free movement. Mary said, "She must have watched a lot of swans."

"It's completely alive," I agreed. I turned to Caillet, who had propped himself against the back of a chair and was watching us. "Where was this painted, do you know?"

"Aude told me when she asked me to sell it to her that it was the Bois de Boulogne, near their home in Passy. Her mother painted it in June eighteen eighty, just before she stopped painting. She called it The Last Swan --that's what's written on the back, in any case. It is really fine, isn't it? Henri would almost have killed to buy it back for Aude. He wrote me three times about it when she was dying. The third time was an angry letter, by the standards of Henri."

He waved a hand as if that emotion had been dismissed for all the ages to come. "I believe this was the final painting that Beatrice de Clerval made, although I cannot prove that. But that would explain the title--it is her last swan--and the fact that I have never been able to find anything about a painting with a later date. Henri, of course, thinks that his painting is the last one--the one called The Swan Thieves. He is very strange about it. It is true that there was not a later one in the first exhibition of her work in the nineteen eighties--it was at the Musee de Maintenon, in Paris. You know about that show? I loaned this large canvas to them for it. In the end, it does not matter," he added, leaning slowly forward with his hands on the back of a chair. "It is a superb painting, one of the best in my collection. It will stay here until I die."

He didn't add what might happen to it after that, and I decided not to ask him. I pointed instead to the portrait sketch. "Who is this?" It was not quite a professional piece of work--a depiction of a woman with wavy short hair like that of a movie star from the 1930s, a little clumsy in execution but also expressive around the eyes, which were full of life, and the thin, sensitive mouth. She seemed to look rather than speak, as if she'd resolved not to say anything, then or later, and it increased the intensity of her gaze. She wasn't a pretty woman, exactly, but there was something handsome and even arresting about her; she had refused, boldly, to be pretty.

Caillet put his head to one side. "That is Aude," he said. "She gave me that portrait while we were still friends, and I have kept it in her honor. I thought she might have liked to have it hanging here with her mother's paintings. I am sure she likes that, wherever she is now."

"Who did it?" The sketch said "1936" in one corner.

"Henri. It was six years after they met. The year before I left. He was thirty-four and I was twenty-four and Aude was fifty-six. So I have his portrait of Aude, and he has mine--a nice symmetry. As I told you, she wasn't beautiful, although he was."

He turned away, as if the conversation had come to its logical conclusion, and if he wanted it to, it had. I rapidly pictured them all: he had left for Mexico just before the war, then, escaping not only love troubles but also the coming disaster in Europe. He had been ten years younger than Henri, and to an artist in his twenties, Aude must have seemed ancient at fifty-six (only four years more than my current age, I realized with a pang). But the woman in the sketch did not look ancient, and she did not look like Beatrice de Clerval, if the Vignot portrait was to be trusted. Not in the least, unless you counted the glow of the eyes. Where and how had Aude and Henri gotten through the war? They had both survived it. "So Henri Robinson is still alive?" I couldn't help saying as we followed Caillet back to his gallery living room.

"He was alive last year," Caillet said without turning around. "He sent me a note on his ninety-seventh birthday. Turning ninety-seven makes one remember all one's former amours, I suppose."

When we reached the sofas again, he did not make his gracious gesture for us to sit down but remained standing in the middle of the room. I realized that he must be eighty-eight himself, if I was calculating all this correctly. It hardly seemed possible. He stood in front of us, graceful, upright, his dark-red skin smooth, his white hair thick and brushed neatly back, his black suit with its unusual cut well-pressed, a man perfectly preserved, as if he had stumbled on the gift of eternal life and had wearied politely even of that. "I am tired now," he said, although he looked as if he could have stood there all day.

"You've been very kind," I told him at once. "Please forgive my asking you one more thing. With your permission, I'd like to write to Henri Robinson for some further information about Beatrice de Clerval's work. Do you have an address you'd be willing to share with me?"

"Of course," he said, folding his arms, the first sign of impatience I'd seen. "I shall find the information for you." He turned and went out of the room, and we heard him calling someone in a controlled, low voice. After a moment he returned with an ancient address book, bound in leather, and the man who had brought us the tray of drinks. There was a little negotiation between them, and the man wrote something out for me while Caillet watched.

I thanked them both--it was an address in Paris, with an apartment number. Caillet checked it over my shoulder. "You may give him my best wishes -- from one old Frenchman to another."

He smiled then, as if viewing something familiar from a great distance, and I felt guilt at having asked a favor so personal.

He turned to Mary. "Good-bye, my dear. It is nice to see a beautiful woman again." She gave him her hand, and he kissed it respectfully, without warmth. "Good-bye, mon ami." He shook hands with me--his grip was strong and dry, as before. "We probably will not meet again, but I wish you the best of luck with your research."

He walked us in silence to his front door and held it open; there was no sign of the servant now. "Good-bye, good-bye," he repeated, but so gently we could hardly hear him. I turned on the walk and waved to him once, where he stood framed by his roses and bougainvillea, impossibly upright, handsome, embalmed, alone. Mary waved, too, and shook her head without speaking. He did not wave back.

That night, as we made love for the second time ever--swimming into the current with more confidence, old lovers overnight--I found Mary's cheeks wet with tears.

"What is it, my darling?"

"Just--today."

"Caillet?" I guessed.

"Henri Robinson," she said. "Caring for so many years for the old woman he loved." And she ran her hand down my shoulder.