Montparnasse. Thierry Sagnier
said Frederick. “It’s nice to see the natives are friendly.”
Easter didn’t respond but pressed closer to him.
Chapter 7
James Johnson stared at the sketch; the sketch stared back. He stood, moved both the easel and canvas closer to a window.
The eyes were wrong. They failed to convey the young man’s cavalier good looks, his daring and courage. Instead, the face showed a certain cruelty, a hint of rudeness in the lips and cast of the mouth. James tore a blank sheet of newsprint from a pad and, with a stick of charcoal, drew a new chin, softer lips, a thinner, more muscular throat.
From the apartment’s open front door came a brief knock, a throat clearing. “C’est votre frère? Your brother, yes?”
Johnson turned, nodded and smiled.
Monsieur Hippolyte Lefebvre came twice daily, at 10 a.m. and 3 p.m., and though he rarely had correspondence of importance or interest, Johnson always welcomed the man’s arrival.
The mailman was almost a foot shorter than Johnson but stood erect as a stake. For the first few months, M. Lefebvre had not been communicative, regarding the American artist more as a peculiarity of time and place than as a human. Johnson was a Ricain, a madman who had chosen wartime France over Philadelphia for unclear reasons that reflected what the mailman called “la folie américaine.”
Over time the two had become friends, or, at least, close acquaintances. M. Lefebvre’s, “Bonjour, Monsieur Johnson!” brightened the expatriate’s day. The little facteur made the effort to pronounce Johnson’s name as well as he could, though he failed to understand why there was an h between the o and the n. Plying him with an ocean of café-crème, Johnson had learned amazing things.
M. Lefebvre knew, for example, that the younger sister of Mademoiselle Gauthier, across the hall and down, was not a sister at all but a daughter, the issue of Mlle. Gauthier’s brief encounter with an American Army captain in 1904. This, Johnson decided, accounted for Mlle. Gauthier’s mother/sister aloofness when he accidentally met them in the hallway. The daughter/sister kept her eyes averted, but once flashed an irreverent grin when her mother/sister was not looking.
M. Lefebvre also knew that Monsieur Dupont, the dour baker at the nearby boulangerie, was conducting an affair of the heart with Madame Ribaud, owner of the flower shop across the street. Mme. Ribaud was far older than the 30-ish M. Dupont, a round, triple-chinned man, the product of his doughy environment. She, in turn, looked much like the pressed and faded flowers in her window display.
Then there was the Delâtre family, who had a boy, 6 years old now, with a head as large as a medicine ball, supported by complex braces attached to his waist and back. M. Lefebvre was friends with the Delâtre’s maid, a country girl from Auvergne, who told him the boy was kept in a small room beneath the servants’ stairway and fed only mashed potatoes and boudin sausage.
Of course, Mesdemoiselles Clothilde and Henriette, who lived in the apartment directly above Johnson’s, were not sisters at all, but followers of Lesbos. With a disapproving look, Mr. Lefevbre told of the magazines the women received, publications singing the praises of same-sex love.
M. Lefebvre knew all this and more. The facteur had a Parisian way of erasing any doubt concerning his veracity: a raised eyebrow, a slightly curled upper lip, a deprecating hand gesture which might be effeminate anywhere else, but in Paris obviated the need for explanations.
The mailman was learning English from a thin, brown-cover book he kept in his satchel. He was proud of his growing vocabulary and had asked Johnson to write down one new word a day, which he repeated as he walked his mail route.
Yesterday the word was “chip.” There had followed a bilingually complex conversation, and the mailman twice threw up his hands in despair and disgust as Johnson enunciated the differences between chip, ship, cheap, sheep, and cheep. To the postman’s French ear, the five words sounded exactly the same. So did bore, boor and boar. Big, bag, beg, bog and bug tortured him. His lips generated grimaces that did nothing for his pronunciation. He found English grotesque yet fascinating.
Pepper, paper, peeper and piper. The more confusing the word, the longer M. Lefebvre lingered over his coffee. Johnson had thought to enter the dark domain of George Bernard Shaw’s ghoti, where gh may be an ef, an o sounds like an ee, and ti becomes sh, so that ghoti is pronounced fish, but he decided the mailman might think this an American’s revenge on the anarchistic French language, with its incomprehensible tenses, silent x’s, silent h’s, and barbarous use of vowels.
Hippolyte Lefebvre had the soul of an adventurer. He had read everything he could find in French written by Jack London, and though he did not approve of the author’s scandalous divorce, he still wished he could emulate him. There were distant relatives in New York he had dreamed of joining after the war. He yearned to be a cowboy, or a taxi driver in Hollywood where customers paid in hundred-dollar bills and everyone owned a new Ford. M. Lefebvre, unmarried and occasionally despondent about his bachelor status, also thought of becoming a polygamist Mormon. Johnson thought it unwise to ask how the mailman planned to acquire several wives in Utah, when he had been so unsuccessful in getting a single one in postwar Paris, where the dearth of younger men made for astonishingly aggressive women.
Johnson did his best to keep the man’s reveries within bounds by citing known American dangers: wild Indians with a penchant for scalps and influenza, murderous Mexicans, Irish and Italian thugs, and buffalo stampedes. Still, Johnson knew, Lefebvre would be an exemplary immigrant, and he sometimes felt a twinge of guilt over his own lack of patriotic encouragement.
From his ground-floor apartment next to the concierge, James Johnson could spy on the lives of his neighbors.
Not a day went by that he did not see a grand mutilé, one of the countless, brutally wounded war veterans—France’s bitter war harvest. He shuddered every time, remembering the mud, the ambulance, the blood.
The disfigured were treated with great respect. Strangers opened doors, helped them cross the streets, viewed them with deference as the heroes they were. They received preferential treatment in shops, theaters and housing, and many still wore their medal-bedecked uniforms. Some were accompanied by attractive young women who, Johnson suspected, were not above calculating to the very last centime what the assistance familiale and retraite militaire might bring.
These maimed survivors were mostly farm boys from the Vosge, Bretagne, Camargue and Flandres.
Many were blind; those who still saw had weary, hooded eyes. They sat at the cafés, empty sleeves and pant legs neatly pinned, gazes fixed on something far distant. Many drank too much, and there were newspaper reports of their paltry crimes—petty thievery, nonpayment of bills after gargantuan meals in expensive restaurants. The authorities were lenient. Yesterday’s France-Soir newspaper reported a fight among a group of grands mutilés during one of their battalion’s monthly reunions held in Montmartre. It took almost 20 police officers to quell the riot. Mme. Bertrand, the concierge in Johnson’s building, had told him in hushed tones that though she had the deepest respect for the gueules cassées—the broken mouths—she didn’t want them in her building. They were known to complain incessantly.
After M. Lefebvre’s morning visit, James Johnson planned to take his easel, palette, brushes and paints to the Opéra. He had found an interesting view of the grand old building, where shadows played across the statues of the Muses, bringing them to life. In the evening, there would be a meal and a walk to the Rotonde to watch the others discuss and argue their work. His French was improving, and once or twice he’d participated in discussions, but mostly he watched and he listened. The others called him Le Grand Muet, the tall silent one, and some, he knew, thought him a snob.
With luck, he’d see Kiki tonight. She often came to the Rotonde with a gaggle of loud girlfriends who dressed outrageously. Funny hats were the fashion; last week Kiki had worn an amazing assemblage of feathers, random pieces of silk and gossamer, all taped or pinned to a cloche perched precariously on her head.
M. Lefebvre did not like artists, or their entourage. He called