RETRIEVING AN ETCHED MOTHER AND CHILD

by 

Margaret H. Wagner

The heavy silk navy curtains at the Hotel La Perouse in Nice, France, rustled to reveal the morning sun. I unlatched the floor-to-ceiling French glass doors and pushed the blue wooden slatted doors open. The tranquil Mediterranean met the horizon line, with the sky a lighter shade of blue. Nice’s Promenade des Anglais, a four-mile paved walkway along the beach, which began to the hotel’s right, already had pedestrians; a few souls dotted the sand beside it, near the low white surf.

I readied my room service breakfast tray to take it outside to the red-tiled deck. Birds chirped through the open door, sentinels-in-waiting for my croissant or brioche. A window fixed in front of the sky, framed by an interior. Was it worth hurrying off to see the artist Matisse when I was already inside one of his paintings, luxuriating in the mysterious spirit of color? The turquoise rug, the emerald tree, the chestnut table, the goldenrod walls.

My mother camped throughout the south of France during her seven-month trip through Europe in 1951, so I doubted she experienced a hotel with an artist’s view. Perhaps in Nice she enjoyed the scent of seaweed, plums, or apples and the sound of church bells hinting at whispered prayers? A year after her sudden death at age 86, I found a box with her 1951 trip notes and letters. That sparked my plans to retrace parts of her trip in 2017. I hoped to retrieve a piece of her.

Years ago, when I was in my twenties, a postcard of one of Matisse’s Nu Bleu cutouts graced the refrigerator in my New York City studio apartment. The deep blue shapes cut with scissors formed a curled nude woman in a yoga-like pose. I often mailed my mother cards, replicas of the art I had seen in New York City museums. I sent her Matisse’s goldfish in a bowl and one of those blue nudes, plus Renoir’s and Mary Cassatt’s idyllic depictions of the mother-daughter bond. Decades later, when I was home to help my parents move to a retirement community, I awoke at 2 a.m. to discover my mother in our guest room sorting and tossing those greeting cards. My parents were of an era that burned correspondence, much to my writerly dismay. I tried to save a bag of their letters, but my father caught me and made me put the stack back in the “to be burned” pile. It would be sweet to find a Matisse card I sent to my mother.

I was fascinated that Matisse’s daughter, Marguerite, was adopted, just like me. I doubted my mother knew that. Birthed by one of his models, Marguerite was raised by Amelie, whom Matisse married four years after Marguerite’s birth. During World War II, the Gestapo arrested both Marguerite and Amelie and charged them with Resistance activities. They subjected Marguerite to months of solitary confinement and torture; Matisse thought his daughter was dead. Eventually, Marguerite made her way to him in the south of France after she escaped from a stalled cattle car that was taking her to a concentration camp.

There was a time I felt imprisoned in my parents’ house in the early 1990s. That was the weekend my parents hired a man to deprogram me because they thought I was in a cult. I sat on my single twin bed on a Saturday night beside the cabinet with my childhood collection of dolls from the places our family traveled. The dolls represented happy vacations around the globe—I got to choose a doll from each country we visited. I surveyed the eight shelves of figures in native costumes as I considered climbing out the window, dropping from the gutter to the ground, and running. But I was in my mid-thirties, an adult after all, and decided I could handle anything.

My parents had endless advice as to what I should be doing. By that point in my life, I had stopped sharing much with them and kept conversation to the weather, museums, or other family members. Before that weekend, my parents showered me with phone calls and sounded excited to have me home. “Progress,” I thought, “maybe they are interested in my endeavors.” But they orchestrated the weekend differently—the deprogrammer arrived after breakfast on Saturday. After continued questions and interrogation, I left the living room by mid-afternoon without baggage to walk to the train station. One of my cousins, who was there at the time, came after me, and we returned home.

“I love your haircut,” my mother said to my cousin as we approached my parents and the deprogrammer in the driveway. Those four words seemed to reflect my family’s lack of connection around emotional issues. My scientist mother and I, a budding artist, looked at the world through different lenses. And at this moment, I didn’t feel any maternal relatedness, only inexplicable parental control.

I bet my mother forgot her defensive response to her parents about camping in the south of France. In a letter to her parents, she wrote: “It was so nice that we camped out every night, which is another reason this letter is so late in being written as there was no place to do anything.” Her parents must have written back with their concern about camping, as in a later epistle, my mother countered: “We stayed in organized camps several times. There are many in France, as people camp for their vacations over here.” I got the impression she tried to assure them it was safe and perfectly proper for a young woman—“everyone did it, so we did, too.” Only the “terrible mosquitos” drove them to sleep inside their Morris Minor (a small car like a Volkswagen Beetle). I was shocked by this because I grew up under the impression that my mother’s version of camping was staying at the Ritz.

Marguerite Matisse was probably glad to be bitten by mosquitos when she finally made it to her father in the south of France. Matisse seemed overwhelmed by her story of torture: “I saw in reality, materially, the atrocious scenes she described and acted out for me. I couldn’t have said if I still belonged to myself.” But he kept those feelings to himself and threw himself into his art.

One of Matisse’s last projects, the Chapel of the Rosary in Vence, a town located in the Cote d’Azur region in southeastern France between Nice and Antibes, was open a few weeks when my mother was nearby in the summer of 1951. Would she, who majored in chemistry and minored in physics, have appreciated the abstract charcoaled geometries of a body tortured on the cross? The diamond of the waist to crossed ankles. The pentagon of the torso and outstretched arms. Symmetrical eyes, a nose, and a mouth from the shroud held limply by a figure with a faceless bowed head. Matisse spent a lifetime paring faces to their barest elements, repeatedly delineating his wife, daughter, mistresses, and models. Mother, mistress, Madonna—impossible to tell who was who.

If the Chapel of the Rosary was forgettable for my mother due to its abstractness, it would be no surprise. However, I was astonished that she shrugged off the artist Picasso. So how did she meet Picasso? I’ve always imagined my mother and her travel companion, a female college friend, sitting in a café in the town of Mougins, where Picasso resided, fifteen minutes between Grasse and Cannes. They would have enjoyed the view looking back up the hill to Grasse and down the hill over terra-cotta tiled roofs to the Bay of Cannes. Sitting under olive, cypress, and pine trees, maybe they smelled stewed hare with tarragon or simmered lamb and rosemary. My mother probably ordered lemonade (lemon soda) with mint because she would have already bought Gruyère cheese, tomatoes, grapes, and chocolate at a local market to save money on the French Riviera.

Despite my insistence that she must remember more of the encounter with an icon of twentieth-century art, my mother never got more specific about Picasso. “He talked about fascism,” she said. I imagined she gave Picasso her signature face of disapproval—the arched left eyebrow in the shape of an inverted V. At my grade school, when she surveyed the cafeteria as a volunteer lunch mom, my cheeks grew hot—I studied my milk carton as her evil eye hit every table.

Politics might have bored my mother, who wanted to see the world before she got married. But since, according to another letter she sent to her home, my mother had a robust conversation about fascism with two dashing sherry magnates a few weeks before in Spain, I suspected my mother’s disdain of Picasso had to do with something else. Did my mother feel Picasso’s eyes fixed on her, taking in her white button-down blouse, calf-length dark cotton skirt, white bobby socks, and saddle shoes? At age twenty-three, she was the right age for Picasso, who then was age sixty-five. Maybe Picasso was with his twenty-five-year-old mistress, Francoise, and their two toddlers? Or fighting with the twenty-one-year-old girl he had an affair with that summer?

I was in my late fifties in 2017 and met no famous artists in the south of France. Instead, I had a heated conversation with a muscle-bound policeman outside of Nice who pulled me off a bus headed to the Musée Matisse. “Billets, billets,” (tickets, tickets) murmured the woman sitting next to me. I showed my ticket to the policeman. “Descendez, descendez, maintenant,” the policeman barked, pointing with a black-gloved thumb to the backdoor exit. “Get off, get off…now!” My mouth dropped. What had I done?

“I have a paid ticket,” I explained in the best French I could manage. The gendarme switched to English, with an accent fit for romance.

“Your ticket isn’t punched.”

“I gave my ticket to the driver.”

“It’s not validated in the machine.”

“Where’s the machine?”

“On the bus.”

The handsome man-in-uniform’s pen forcefully checked items in his notebook. He tore off the sheet, swung it in front of my face, and said: “Fifty euros. You pay me.”

Was this a sting operation over bus tickets?

My mother never had this—men rushed to assist her. The only time she encountered an official who detained her was at the border of Gibraltar. The officer on the Spanish side wouldn’t allow her into the UK territory because she didn’t have the proper paperwork to return to Spain, and he needed to stamp those forms. My mother was proud to have gotten past the Gibraltar border patrol. Was it her youthful smile and the determination that no one would stop her European grand tour? “You’ll see us in a few hours after we’ve toured the Rock,” deterred any discussion of monetary fines.

But, here on a quiet suburban bus stop in the south of France, I paid a man who towered two feet from my face fifty euros and waited another hour for the next bus to the museum.

Back at the hotel, in the evening light, I thought of Matisse’s book Jazz. One page depicted Icarus against a royal blue night sky with yellow stars. A red dot was on Icarus’s black body, approximately where the heart should be. Critics wondered if this was a response to World War II and Marguerite’s torture. Perhaps it was only a depiction of artistic yearning. Matisse wrote: “The character of a face in a drawing depends not upon its various proportions but upon a spiritual light which it reflects.”

Before I embarked on my trip, I discovered a photograph my father took when I was about eight years old. I had climbed onto the kitchen counter to reach the cupboard to put dishes away, and my mother helped me get to the floor. My arms draped around her neck; her hands clasped around my thighs. My mother’s blue-flowered shorts echoed the blue of my headband. My smile missed a front tooth; hers, beatific. Our cheeks pressed together and tilted down to the left. The outline of our round faces and the upward arc of my arm were in the same position as Matisse’s line drawing of mother and child on entrance tiles to the Chapel of the Rosary in Vence.

I etched our faces into my memory with the same awe and joy I felt seeing Matisse’s entrance tiles. My mother never felt closer.