That was when I knew. I should never have hired her.
1863
As Jacob waited seven years for Rachel, my son waited seven years for our kitchen maid. At first I argued with him, but my entreaties had no effect. I was honest with him, as I believe a mother should be. We sat in my chamber, where I had hung the painting of Jestine and the tiny painting of the Cathedral. He was painting more all the time, but I adored these two early works. That did not mean I would give in to my son, though he was now considered a fine artist by many of his peers, not that their respect paid his bills.
“There is nothing you can say against her that will change my mind,” Camille said.
His hands were rough, his clothes unwashed, but he had gracious manners, likely inherited from his father, who had never lost his French elegance.
“She’s uneducated,” I said.
“As were you,” he shot back at me.
“I was my father’s student,” I informed him.
“She’ll be mine,” Camille said.
He crossed his long legs. He looked out of place in our chamber. His clothes were paint-smeared, but I dared not reprimand him for this.
“Our people have struggled in order to survive, that is why we band together and why it is a sin to marry outside our faith.”
He laughed then and shook his head. “You’re not serious. Do you dare to tell me about the rules of marriage? Was I not the one who went to the Moravian School? Who had no bar mitzvah? Who was an outcast from my own people? All because of you. You did as you pleased.”
“But your father was of our faith. In the eyes of God we did the right thing.”
Camille stood then, sick of arguing and sick at heart.
“You loved him and that was that. So please don’t tell me to do otherwise.”
There was the dull thud of recognition when I realized how pigheaded my son was. Tell him no, and he was bound to do what was forbidden. He had never viewed the world the way others did, and that was more true now than ever. We continued to support him, paying the rent for a studio and then, when he moved out of our apartment, also for lodgings on the far side of the city. I felt the old bitterness inside me, twisting through my heart, the distance between a mother and a child that I now knew from both sides. When I passed by the mirror in the corridor, I sometimes thought it was my mother’s image I spied, not mine. This was her revenge. Everything I had done to her, my son now did to me.
We had made the right decision to leave St. Thomas, for the War Between the States was raging. South Carolina, where much of the trade had been, had been the first state to secede after Lincoln was elected, and no ships were safe. The Emancipation Proclamation declared that as of January 1, 1863, all slaves would be freed, but the bloody business of freedom took a toll, as it had on our islands. We read about the horrors, and were grateful to be in Paris, where the only war was in our family.
Camille came and asked for our approval to marry my maid, admitting that Julie had become pregnant. We denounced their union, for we were reminded of ourselves and we did not wish the same troubles on our son that we had experienced. Then the baby was lost. After that I couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t look at myself in the mirror. Who would I find there? I wondered if every girl grew up to be a stranger to herself. What would I have thought of myself if I could go back and meet face-to-face with the headstrong young woman I once was, pounding on the Reverend’s door, eyes shining, convinced that love was the only thing that mattered?
Camille still wished to marry Julie, even though she was Catholic and uneducated, a farm girl who knew when an apple was ripe but had never met a Jew before her employment in our home. To marry outside our faith was unacceptable. I wondered if my mother’s ghost was whispering in my son’s ear, urging him to defy me just to be vindictive, or if he was still under the influence of that witch, Madame Halevy, who first turned him against me. He did not believe in our faith or our God or in any God it seemed. He had declared that his only faith was in nature: a leaf, a flower, a woman with blue eyes whose soul was as quiet as snow. He was an anarchist and a leader of his fellow painters, all outsiders who were not wed to the old-fashioned forms of realism, all of whom looked up to him. When I saw him now, his coat flaring out behind him, his tall, awkward form lurching down the cobbled streets, he seemed like an angel who had lost his way and was plummeting into the darkness. At last I understood what my mother had told me. I would only understand her grief when my child caused me my own.
Our son was too much of a rebel to work within any academie, and soon left his position with Melbye. He studied with the master landscape painter Corot, with whom he journeyed out of Paris, declaring that the countryside was an antidote to all that poisoned our society. He grew more radical, faithful to the best interests of the workingman. He was already an outcast among the establishment and had been rejected from the exhibition by the Salon. The established painters did not care for his work, or his politics. But the Emperor Napoleon III had surprised everyone by setting up an alternative gallery, the Salon des Refusés, for new artists such as Monet and Cézanne and Manet and the American painter Whistler, and of course Pizzarro, respected and loved by this group of radical artists. I did not understand my son as a man, but I had come to understand there was a vision other than the one we had known. After living with his art in my own chamber, I saw there was more than mere mimicry, and that art was a world unto itself, with its own symbols and language. A leaf seen in a certain light might be gray or violet as well as purple, and a latticework of twigs might easily turn red as the sky paled above the city.