a trip we took around Normandy. March of 1913, I’d say.”
Yale jotted the date next to the three Ranko Novak sketch slots. The absolute least important of the details he’d been sent for. If he returned with only the cow sketch dates, Bill would think it was a prank.
“We wanted to get married but we needed to wait, because in April, Ranko entered the Prix de Rome. It wasn’t just a prize, it was a contest for students, a yearlong thing, and they’d eliminate you one by one. It was like Miss America, the way each round they send those poor girls off crying. And—can you guess?—it was only open to unmarried men. You had to be French, and of course another student raised some nonsense that Ranko wasn’t truly French—it was his name, I suppose, the fact that he wasn’t named Renée—but they let him go forward anyway. It upset him, though.
“He was quite fragile. And strange! Now, he’s one who should not have been at the Beaux-Arts. It was the establishment, you know, and they wanted to tame him. It was the age of the bohemian, and the last thing you’d want was a pat on the back from the old standard-bearers. He was always tamping down his oddness for them. It worked, unfortunately, in the end. He sanded his work down till they loved it.”
Roman said, “Those two paintings don’t seem sanded down.”
“Well, exactly. Those weren’t ones his teachers ever saw. The one of the little girl—he did that around the same time, dashed it off. It was supposed to be me; he was painting me as he imagined I’d looked as a girl. He got it all wrong, I’m afraid, but still that piece has a soul. The work he did for them, though, it was polished and flat and religious. And he was an atheist!
“He progressed and progressed in the contest, and the end of the whole ordeal was that they sequestered you in a studio in the Château de Compiègne for seventy-two days. Seventy-two! Can you imagine? And they gave you a theme to paint on. First you had twelve hours to sketch, and then you had the ten weeks to paint, and you weren’t allowed to vary from the sketch. Whoever decided an artist shouldn’t change his mind? So for seventy-two days he was locked up, and there I sat pining away.”
Roman said, “Could he write you letters?”
“No! It was the worst time of my life. Now, I say that, but really I fell more in love every day. What’s more romantic than waiting for a lover who’s locked up in a chateau? I lost twenty pounds.
“I can’t remember what theme they gave, but what he produced was this stiff pietà. It looked like a bad Easter pageant, is what I thought. And he won. Three students won, in fact, which was a scandal. They hadn’t awarded the prize the year before, and someone before that had to give his prize back for some silly reason, so there were three spots open at the Villa Medici in Rome, which is where the contest winners were sent. Any other year, to be honest, Ranko wouldn’t have won. Everyone knew it was really third place, and he knew it too.
“So you can imagine: The love of my life sequesters himself for months, and his prize is three to five years in Rome. And we can’t get married now, because there’s no room there for a wife. He was elated, and I was just devastated.”
“This is the thing,” Debra interjected. “I understand devoting your life to the memory of someone great, but he was a jerk.”
Yale had to silently agree. Maybe Ranko hadn’t been a bad guy—the prize sounded like the opportunity of a lifetime—but if a young Nora had come to Yale for relationship advice, he’d have told her to cut her losses and move on.
“Then that summer, two things happened. One you already know: That terrible man had to go shoot the Archduke and start the war, and I could have just kicked him. But the other is that my father died suddenly. So in one instant, Ranko’s travels to Rome were put off, and in the next, I was called home.”
Roman made a sympathetic noise, underlined the word died in his notes.
“Everything was chaos, you can imagine. I wasn’t going to leave, I was going to stay with Ranko. I was almost happy for the war, in a horribly selfish way. But Paris