* * *
—
“You can’t make her talk too much today,” Debra said. Yale assured her all they really wanted were the missing details. Debra went and perched on the staircase landing with knitting; she was just visible through the doorway. Yale wished he’d eaten less breakfast. Or maybe more breakfast, to absorb whatever strawberry wine was still sloshing in his stomach.
Nora did look tired. Her skin, always pale, had a bluish cast, and her eyes were pink. When Yale told her they really had to get a time frame on the other works, she didn’t object. “It’s all before ’25, I’d think,” she said. “I wasn’t modeling much at the end. By ’25 I was engaged to David.”
Roman sat on the couch with Yale, but as far away as he possibly could. He had the binder of Xeroxes, and he’d spent last week collating, labeling, chronologizing, building an index. Nora suggested they sort the letters by correspondent. “Then I can patch it together.” So while Roman leafed through for the few Modigliani letters first, Yale took the notebook and pen and asked Nora if she remembered exactly when she’d returned to Paris.
“I’d say mid-spring of 1919. I was twenty-four, and I felt terribly adult. In Philadelphia, I was considered an old maid.”
“What happened to Ranko?” Roman said, and Yale wanted to throttle him. Yale did actually want to know, but not until everything else was settled. It slowly came back to him that he’d dreamt about Ranko last night, about Ranko locked away in his castle. Yale was trying to phone him, trying to get him to come out and see Nora before she burned his paintings. The number he’d been dialing, Yale realized, was the number of the Out Loud office.
“Well,” Nora said, “that was the question. I hadn’t heard a word, not a single letter. I’d find myself hoping he’d died, so it didn’t mean he’d rejected me, and then I’d hope he hated me, if it meant he hadn’t died. Don’t imagine I stayed in love the whole time. I had a few gentleman friends in Philadelphia, though no one I wanted to marry. The boys I’d grown up with had gone off to the war, so I was stuck with—oh gracious, there was a shoe salesman. After all those wild young artists. I was bored out of my mind.”
Yale started to ask how she began modeling, but he was too slow—the brain fog didn’t help—and she was off again.
“You have to understand, we didn’t know who was alive or dead. My friends from Colarossi, even professors. And on top of the war, there was the flu! Sometimes you’d get a letter, So-and-so was wounded in action. And later you’d hear he’d died in the hospital camp, and you didn’t know if it was the wounds or the flu. But mostly there was no news at all. You really won’t find too much Modi in there, dear,” she said to Roman. But Roman kept looking. Yale wondered if he was hiding behind the binder, avoiding eye contact.
“I got back to Paris, and Paris was gone. Not the city, just the—I don’t know if I can explain. The boys were gone, our classmates, or they were missing limbs. There was an architecture student who came back intact, only he’d lost his voice from mustard gas, never said another word. Everyone that spring just wandered. You’d find a friend in a café, and even if you’d hardly known them you’d run and kiss them, and you’d exchange news about who was dead. I don’t know how you could compare it to anything else. I don’t know how you could.”
Yale had missed a step. “Compare what?”
“Well, you! Your friends! I don’t know how it’s like anything other than war!”
Roman froze—Yale could see it in his peripheral vision, Roman’s fingers stopping on the pages—and Yale wanted to assure him he couldn’t have contracted anything from Yale’s hand. Or maybe Roman was worried Nora’s “you” included him.
Nora said, “That’s why I picked you, why I wanted you to have all this! The instant Fiona told me about you, I knew. I understand Mr. Lindsey’s in charge of the show, but you’re the one who’s going to make sure it’s cared for the right way.”
This wasn’t true in any official sense, but Yale nodded. “Of course,” he said.
“Because you’ll understand: It was a ghost town. Some of those boys were dear friends. I’d studied next to them for two years. I’d run around with them, doing all the ridiculous things you do when you’re young. I could tell you their names, but it wouldn’t mean a thing to you. If I told you Picasso died in the war, you’d understand. Poof, there goes Guernica. But I tell you Jacques Weiss died at the Somme, and you don’t know what to miss. It—you know what, it prepared me for being old. All my friends are dying, or they’re dead already, but I’ve been through it before.”
Yale hadn’t particularly thought of Nora having current friends. Somehow he’d always thought of friends as the people you met early and stayed bonded to forever. Maybe this was why his loneliness was hitting him so hard. He couldn’t imagine going out and selecting a brand-new cohort. How unimaginable that Nora had lived another seven decades, that she’d known the world this long without her first adult friends, her compatriots.
Nora said, “Every time I’ve gone to a gallery, the rest of my life, I’ve thought about the works that weren’t there. Shadow-paintings, you know, that no one can see but you. But there are all these happy young people around you and you realize no, they’re not bereft. They don’t see the empty spaces.”
Yale wished Roman weren’t in the room, that he and Nora could sit and cry together. She fixed him with her wet eyes, held his gaze as if she were squeezing it.
Roman said, “And Ranko wasn’t around?”
Nora blinked. “Well. No one knew where he was. Some of my friends were still at Colarossi, but I didn’t have money to go back; I’d only saved enough for the trip. I stayed with a Russian girl who’d been a classmate, a terrible influence.
“There were paid evening classes for the public, and some of the instructors would let us sneak in. I thought I’d skip around town and paint things, but I was at such loose ends. I wanted to paint boys who’d lost arms, but I couldn’t bring myself to. So in the midst of all the chaos, there I sat drawing fruit. The same brainless exercises I’d given those children in Philadelphia.”
“And you met these artists then?” Yale prompted. “That year, or later?”
“That summer and that fall.”
Roman took the notebook from Yale, flipped to the back. “Modigliani returned to Paris in the spring of 1919,” he said. He’d made a timeline in there, color coded and everything. “With Jeanne Hébuterne and their daughter.” Yale could smell Roman’s sweat from here—not a bad scent, but one he’d been up close to yesterday, one that accosted him with its familiarity.