The Witch of Painted Sorrows

Chapter 14

The next few days brought huge changes. Taking my place among Moreau’s students at the École, I created quite a stir. News had spread quickly that a woman had been admitted and even though I was dressed the same as all the men, wherever I went heads turned.

After class, I would rush back to Maison de La Lune where Julien would be waiting and we would drink wine and make love. Afterward I’d dress in the clothes my grandmother expected to see me in and return to her apartment on rue de las Chaise.

At the end of the week, I arrived home to two pieces of terrible news. Grand-mère’s uncle had died that afternoon, and she had received a telegram from Mr. Lissauer in New York City.

I read it with a shaking hand. Benjamin, the lawyer wrote, had been to visit him again, now demanding information about my father’s family, looking for the names of even distant or estranged relatives who I might have turned to for sanctuary. Mr. Lissauer insisted he knew of none. Benjamin swore to do whatever it took to learn my whereabouts and left the lawyer’s office much aggrieved.

I was trembling by the time I finished reading it. Benjamin’s presence was suddenly there with us in the room, looming large and threatening. Try as I might, I was not sure I believed Grand-mère when she told me that Monsieur Lissauer would never betray my father’s trust in him.

In retrospect, agreeing to go with my grandmother to her uncle’s funeral the next day was a terrible mistake. How did I not realize that the service would sharpen the pain of my father’s death? I wasn’t thinking clearly. I’d been so disturbed by the telegram, by the knowledge that my husband had stepped up his hunt for me, I was almost childlike in not wanting to leave my grandmother’s side.

Temple Emanu-El in New York City, which my family occasionally attended, and which was the most famous and elegant in all of Manhattan, was not as grand as the magnificent synagogue on rue Buffault by half. This house of worship was worthy of royalty. Everywhere was gilt and silver, gas lamps and candles. Everywhere, there was a glow, a shimmer. If God existed, and my father and I had never been certain he did, surely he would visit here and be impressed by the home he was offered.

Upstairs in the women’s section of the synagogue, all the mourners reminded me that loss was an inevitable reality. There was no escaping it. There were only ways to push it aside, hide it behind locked doors, but eventually it seeped out, its pain fresh and raw as if it were new.

Buffeted by feelings, I was not sure how I was going to survive the day. Then I remembered Moreau’s lecture about capturing not just the shapes and forms but also the emotion of the body. The most difficult lesson, he said, was learning to draw through pain and with pain.

I pulled a small sketchbook out of my reticule and began to draw the face of a woman mourner who sat in such a way I was able to include some of the architectural elements of the temple.

Grand-mère glanced at me. “What are you doing?” On her face was an expression of deep concern. Almost horror, I thought.

“I’m sorry if you think it’s rude. But it’s so hard to sit here… to see all this sadness… to think of Papa…”

She shook her head. “That’s not what I mean,” my grandmother said in an annoyed tone of voice. She pointed to my hands.

“I’m just sketching.”

“But why?”

“Why not? I’ve been spending so much time at museums. Everywhere I go there are artists and galleries and talk of this painter and that, and it both interests me and occupies me.”

She was staring at my drawing, and I knew what she was seeing. I knew how good I had become. And far too quickly. In class, the studies I was doing were getting better every day. Boring though they might be-I was just painting the model as she or he stood or sat or lay on the platform-my work was improving daily. Moreau didn’t question it-he had seen the paintings I’d presented as mine, the nude studies I’d taken from the studio. He expected me to excel as my wrist healed. But Julien had been astonished by my progress when I’d showed him what I had done in class. More than once he had asked me if it was really true that I had not been painting all along and just hid it from him. I assured him that I never had studied seriously. And when he asked how I could explain my ability, I told him I couldn’t.

“But if you are doing it here, now, this is no hobby,” Grand-mère said.

“What do you mean?” I asked

“You are obsessed, aren’t you? I’ve seen this affliction. I know about it. She-” My grandmother stopped herself from what she was about to say, paused, and then continued. “No, this is not good for you. I don’t like it, Sandrine. It’s not healthy.”

I was about to argue when the organ music began. I continued sketching, though. Suddenly my pencil was drawing something I wasn’t seeing in front of me but imagining. I’d experienced this twice in class. It had made me excited and afraid then and was having the same effect on me now.

Even though this image was coming from my own mind, it seemed foreign. I was drawing a gaunt creature with large sad eyes, dripping tears that, even though I only had a graphite pencil, I knew were tears of blood. And as I drew, I heard words… her ruby-red words flowing… flowing like blood… as she whispered to me. I understood the words but not their meaning, but I used them as part of the composition, weaving each letter of each word into her long curls, into the fabric of her elaborate skirt.

Finally to love. Finally to end the pain. Finally to find the secrets of my soul.

I was still filling in the garments when my grandmother put one of her gloved hands on the tiny sketchbook, and with her other hand took the pencil from mine and put it in her purse.

“I said enough.”

Staring at her, I dared her to look at me so I could show my displeasure, but she did not. I closed my Sennelier sketchbook and put it back inside my silk bag.

As the music filled the cavernous space, it also reverberated inside of me, the chords making my bones and my insides thrum. When Julien was inside of me, I felt like this, and as I sat there on the cushioned pew, I experienced the same surge of excitement his touch engendered. I was alive. I might not have wanted to be, but I was. The cool blood that used to run through my veins was always hot now. A small look, a gesture, was enough to ignite me. And it wasn’t just Julien who could spark me. In Moreau’s class there were several men who appealed to me. Of course I did not approach them. I tried to keep from even looking at them, but sometimes one would say something or move a certain way, and I’d feel that throb deep inside me and know.

I wondered if it was blasphemous to think such thoughts in shul. Certainly it was brazen.

The cantor ended his song, and the silence alerted me to the rabbi leading us in a prayer, followed by him speaking of the sad occasion that had brought us all there. As his words droned on, staid and expected, I imagined painting this scene: the black-robed, dour rabbi; the upturned faces of the mourners; the shafts of colored light filtering through the stained glass; the glinting silver and gold accoutrements and ornaments.

Moreau was a master at painting this kind of opulence. I didn’t want to copy him, though. Nor did he want me to. There were so many students who did nothing but that. Rather, he had been urging me to find my own painterly vocabulary. I hadn’t yet, but every day it became clearer to me that, once I learned the language of color and line, shadow and shine, I would paint the mystical world that we live in. The penumbras, the mysteries, the secrets behind the obvious. Everything that lay just beyond sight.

In my lap, my fingers twitched as I imagined squeezing yellows and browns and greens onto the palette. Dipping my brush into the luxurious colors. Stroking them onto a canvas just waiting for their embrace.

I longed to paint the faces of the mourners with their angels hovering above them and with the ghosts of their dead looking down on them, wanting to comfort them if only they knew the magical pathways to reach them.

The angels and ghosts were recognizable to me, and yet the people in the pews were strangers. How was that possible? I should have at least thought some of them looked familiar since many of us were related.

After the service we climbed into one of the waiting carriages and set off for the cemetery where my great-great uncle would be interred in what Grand-mère told me was the family mausoleum.

The idea of seeing this edifice excited me for some reason, and I sat perched on the edge of my seat in anticipation. With us were two of Grand-mère’s cousins, elderly sisters who didn’t stop gossiping about family the whole ride. They paid me little heed. They were far more caught up in the drama of how Max had died, in his lover’s bed, and the way he had-most fairly, they thought-left his estate. Only enough to his wife for her to subsist. And why? She had been carrying on an affair de coeur with a married woman, a famous English writer, and the doctor, for all his brilliance, found his wife’s flagrant sexual escapades embarrassing.

“A male lover,” one of the cousins said, “wouldn’t have bothered Max a bit. But a woman? Well, that implied far too much about him.”

As we walked through the rows of graves at the cemetery, I began to see things that could not be there. Or perhaps I was just composing a horror painting in my mind’s eye and, because of my grief, believed I was seeing it.

The people beneath the graves, skeletons wearing shrouds, were celebrating our arrival. A burial wasn’t a sorrowful occasion for them. Welcoming a loved one to the underworld was a happy event. Most of the ghouls’ faces were largely intact; only bits of flesh had rotted away to reveal bone.

One ghoul, who I somehow knew was Max’s first wife, even though no one had mentioned he’d been married before, stood apart from the pack. She had lustrous black hair and glowing blue eyes that dripped pearl tears that pooled at her feet as she joyously waited for the father of her babies to join her.

Small children who had died far too early scampered up to her, stealing the pearls, stringing them on sinew they pulled from their bones so they could make wigs of them. Soon all the imps were wearing elaborate hair dressings of pure white or pink-tinged pearls. The scene shone with their glow.

The graveside service was long, and when it was over, I hoped we would leave hastily. I wanted to return home so I could sketch out my vision, but my grandmother insisted we stay so she might introduce me to the rabbi, Jacob Richter, another of my cousins.

“I am so sorry for your recent loss,” he said. “Your father and I were very close growing up. I loved him like a brother.” Taking my hand, he held it to his chest. For a moment, he gazed into my face as if searching for something.

Then he frowned.

My grandmother never missed an expression, a gesture, a mood, or a fleeting thought that passed over someone’s face.

“Is something wrong, Jacob?” she asked.

He ignored her and leaned closer to me. “Have you been well, Sandrine?”

“Well?”

“Since coming to Paris, how have you slept? Have you been having disturbing dreams?”

How did he know? I’d told Julien about the dreams but not that they’d returned.

I backed away a bit so that it seemed the rabbi was pulling me. I let go of his hand and stumbled.

“You’re in touch with a troubled spirit, aren’t you?” he asked. “She’s showing you her realm. We must find out why.”

“No, no… I don’t know what you mean.”

“The dreams you are having may not be yours but hers,” he said, in such a low voice I wasn’t sure my grandmother could hear him.

I sensed he was trying to be compassionate, but he was frightening me, and I just shook my head. “No, no.”

My grandmother spoke. “Since Sandrine’s father so recently died, whatever disturbance you sense is her grief.”

“Is your father’s passing all that is troubling you?” he asked me. “Or is there something else?”

“Do the souls here today stay here? Are they trapped here?” I asked the question that had been bothering me.

“What are you talking about, Sandrine? You sound mad,” my grandmother exclaimed.

“It’s all right, Eva,” the rabbi said to her. “Her question makes sense to me.” He looked back at me. “You know, it’s forbidden for women to study the Kabala.”

“I never studied the Kabala. I just want to know if the souls are trapped here.”

“Are you saying you haven’t read it?”

It was as if a door inside my mind opened and information came flooding in. The way it did when I painted. One moment I would be looking at a white canvas, and the next I would see an entire composition in my mind.

“I haven’t read it, no. My father did, and we discussed certain parts, but nothing about what I’ve seen here today.”

“If you would like, we can meet to talk about what is troubling you,” he offered.

“Her father died, that’s what is troubling her.” Grand-mère seemed determined to assign her own meaning and explanation to my conversation with the rabbi.

Ignoring my grandmother, the rabbi continued to hold my gaze. “Have you been finding new interests?”

I said nothing, but my grandmother answered: “She’s sketching.”

Part of me wanted to laugh. Of all the things I was doing, sketching was the most benign and least radical.

“Are you feeling things with more intensity?” the rabbi continued his questioning.

I didn’t answer, but I felt my cheeks flush. Suddenly, standing there in the cemetery in front of the large mausoleum with its lovely stained glass windows, I was actually experiencing Julien’s lips on mine, and the gathering and pulsing that was so new to me still, started up deep inside me.

Beside me, my grandmother became even more agitated. “What is it, Jacob? What do all these questions mean? What are you suggesting?”

Ignoring her still, he asked me if I was able to sleep.

I told him I was.

“And when you are awake, are your thoughts your own?”

“What do you mean?” My grandmother’s voice was raised. Had anyone from the mourning party still been present, it would have been most embarrassing. “It’s not possible, Jacob. These things don’t exist.”

The rabbi turned to her and put a hand on her shoulder. “It’s all right, Eva. I can help her.”

She brushed off his hand. “No, this is rubbish. Nonsense. Old-fashioned fairy tales. We are living in an age of science and reason. There are no ghosts. No demons. People are not possessed by spirits from the past.”

I stared at her. What was she saying? The rabbi had not mentioned any such thing to me. But that was what his questions meant, wasn’t it? And my answers, even if I had not voiced them out loud, suggested they certainly did exist, and I was being haunted by one.