Pictures at an Exhibition Page 5

  March of that year also beheld the last great exhibition at the Berenzon Gallery—though of course we did not know this at the time—with works by Degas and Cézanne. Mother insisted on attending the opening, though she gave guests her left hand and retired earlier than usual. Somehow, Father must have warned the company of her condition: there were no requests for a performance, no coterie of tipsy favorites afterward, upstairs, leaning against the piano and singing.

  When the pyramids of cakes and champagne glasses had been cleared away, my father and I sat on the divan, shoulders touching.

  I anticipated the ritual with painful pleasure. Father could be cruel and dismissive of me during the day, before my mother or Rose, but when it was evening and the green carpet turned the gallery into a forest glade, my father was a different man from the one others saw during daylight.

  With my eyes shut, I recited the paintings and he listed their dimensions.

  “At the Milliner's,” I said. “A woman trying on a hat. This is more muted than later works, because Degas is not going blind yet so there's no need to paint in those iridescents.”

  We heard a glass break upstairs. “These fits!” Father stood and stamped his foot. “Whatever pills that quack gave your mother aren't doing anything but making her hair fall out.” I heard Mother wail. We both started.

  Still, I did not want Father to go to her yet. I needed to ask him something. A thought gnawed at me. Father made to leave, then paused. “You're too old to recite paintings every night with your father, aren't you?” Before I could reply, he closed the door, and I heard him take the stairs to the apartments two at a time.

  I lit a cigarette and continued to mutter the names of the paintings.

  Someone entered the room behind me. “They say talking to yourself is a sign of money in the bank.” Rose's voice was throaty, and she wore an orange silk dress I recognized as one of my mother's castoffs.

  The ceiling above us creaked and groaned. Water rushed through the pipes. Father drew Mother a bath. There was splashing and murmuring voices. First Mother laughed, then Father.

  Still standing, Rose made one full turn, as if she were seeing the gallery for the first time. “Imagine growing up with a father who discussed fine art—his fine art—with you every night.”

  “He won't talk about much else with me,” I said.

  “Still,” she said, “consider the alternative.”

  I nodded, unsure of what to say.

  To my surprise, Rose sat beside me and shut her eyes. “Where shall we begin?” she asked.

  I paused, hoping to avoid the Degas ballerina statue thrusting her bronzed chin and narrow rib cage in our direction. She was eerie, too childlike and too suggestive.

  But Rose pointed to the Degas. “Little Dancer Aged Fourteen. Not beautiful, yet inviting, and likely a prostitute.” Rose tilted her head like a bird.

  “They were in an impossible situation,” I said.

  “Call it what you will. The original was wax, with real human hair and a tutu, and it made the crowds furious.”

  Upstairs, my mother turned on her radio. Music this time, not the news.

  “Le nozze di Figaro,” Rose whispered. Mother had taken her to the opera some weeks earlier, when the orange dress must have been exchanged. I had a sudden vision of Rose pinning the syllables of Mozart's title like a banner on a clothesline. “Non so più. My heart hurts, it is so beautiful.” She touched her fingers there.

  “Bertrand brought a dancer from Pigalle back here once,” I began, aware that my brain was not permitting me to fix ideas (dancer, prostitute, Bertrand, painting, the humming feeling in my blood) together in a sensible way. “She kept asking how much each painting was worth and was disappointed that I didn't know. I made up a figure and she said, ‘Oh, that's not a lot of money’”

  “Why didn't you know?” Rose asked. “Why did you bring her to the gallery?”

  “It was Bertrand. They left after ten minutes.”

  The knuckles on her hand touched my own. We were both exhausted from the party. Her soft speech made me want to lean in and listen to the small intake of her breath. I flushed. I could not think. What would my father have done? I pictured him in my place, a young man, holding her, threading her hair between his fingers, looking at Almonds while he kissed her.

  So I drew her face to mine. I could smell the familiar honeysuckle scent behind her ears and on her neck. Upstairs, I heard the radio turn on and off, then on again, then off. It was my parents, fighting over the dial and its stream of bad news. The orange silk skirt of Rose's dress pooled around her legs. I thought of the poem where the woman says, I am half sick of shadows. The bells outside rang midnight, then the first hour of the day.

  Rose whispered, between our breaths, “Your father paid three hundred thousand francs for the Degas in 1931 and did not exhibit it for five years. Then Alain de Leonardis bought it for a million francs.” She let me unhook her brassiere. “The Cézanne sold for sixty thousand at auction and your father has reserved it for the Mariotti collection for eight hundred thousand francs.”

  I put my hands under the hem of her dress and lifted it to her waist. Rose gasped. I grew dizzy and single-minded. She pushed me away when I tried, with what I thought was considerable charm, to remove another article of clothing. “The Picasso was part of a lot: three paintings for three hundred seventy-five thousand francs. The nude alone will sell for three hundred fifty thousand.” The church told us it was half-past two. We began to fall asleep kissing. Soon dawn hovered outside the diamond-paned skylight, a gray cat pressing its back against the glass. “The almonds seem to glow, don't they?” she said.

  “It's strange that my father has never been able to sell it,” I said, and tried to kiss her some more. She drew away.

  “Max, I file his correspondence. He gets letters every week asking after that one—from São Paulo, New York, Peking—and he just tells me to throw them out. Almonds is not for sale. He bought it for thirty thousand francs in 1918 from—”

  “Yes, I know,” I said. I didn't.

  The diamond-paned glass grew light. I gathered up Rose's shawl. Holding her shoes, Rose made her way toward her apartment, and I could swear the paintings turned to look.

  As we crossed from the gallery to the hallway leading up to the Nurse's Room, Rose put her hand back to stop me. My father stood before Rose's door, still dressed in his tuxedo. Twice he lifted his hand to knock, then dropped it to his side. Shaking his head, he thrust his fists in his pockets and walked back to the kitchen.

  “What …” I began.

  Rose shook her head. “I don't know.”

  I left her. It was nearly 5 a.m. I heard the cook moving about and the hiss of gas and the clank of a cabinet sprung open. A pot rattled against its shelf and then against the stove.

  WHEN MADRID CAPITULATED AND VALENCIA CLOSELY followed, my Anatomy professor Negrín, whom I had never really thought of as Spanish, stepped in front of a train at Abbesses. According to the newspapers, Negrín had shouted, “Death to the Fifth Column!” I suspected the paper embroidered the details of his suicide. He had been a soft-spoken man.

  Our exam was therefore postponed. I had attended the class in only a desultory fashion, it was true, yet I could not believe that Professor Negrín had died, and thus for once I reviewed for the test. Rose offered to help. We studied in the Jardin Labouré, which was garishly sunny and blooming.

  “Did you go to the lecture today?” Rose asked, her voice odd.

  “No,” I replied. I did not want to see Negrín's substitute at the front of the hall, pretending that nothing had happened.

  “Will you get the notes?”

  “No intention of it.”

  “Ivan said the lecture was interesting—”

  “He's a brute.”

  “—on the birth ailments of children.”

  “You shouldn't talk to him.”

  “He came to the Louvre to tell me about a case study from your class.”

&
nbsp; “I have enough case studies here at home,” I said.

  “I'll say,” said Rose.

  Though the sun remained bright overhead, we heard a gathering storm of tapping, like the sound of a rain shower coming in.

  “I left my umbrella at home,” Rose said.

  I lifted my gaze to the parted garden gate, and we watched a stream of blind children pass by, walking quickly and ticking their canes, laughing and calling out to one another. “Cailleux has three new Matisses in his gallery,” Rose said, after the children were gone from the street. “And your father has an exclusive contract with Henri for première vue. You understand what that means. Henri can choose what he might want to sell privately or keep in his own collection, but after that your father is the only dealer who can sell the paintings when they first go on the market.”

  I nodded. “So tell him. He'll be hopping mad.”

  “No,” Rose said, closing my anatomy book with a clap, “you are going to pay the Cailleux Gallery a visit. I have my own suspicions, but I want to hear what you think before I tell you.” She walked ahead of me out of the garden. “Go and beguile whatever imbecile is working there. Pretend you're interested in buying and ask all the naive questions you're afraid to ask your father—or me—about the paintings. He'll fall right into your lap.” I grabbed her by the waist, and she let me kiss her, briefly, and then appeared to change her mind.

  AT THE CAILLEUX GALLERY ON RUE WASHINGTON, a girl with a pink sweater and a vacant stare followed behind me as I circled the room, where three Matisses were displayed. I asked her when they had been painted, if Cailleux had others, what they cost, and if I could take the photographic plates home with me (as was standard practice when one considered investing thousands in a painting). The assistant's name was Mademoiselle Clothilde, and I told her I only liked pretty paintings and pretty girls.

  “They're Matisse's most recent work.” Mademoiselle Clothilde smiled weakly. “And these are the only ones we have, though more are expected. Of course, the master's genius is hard to predict.” She adjusted the kerchief at her neck.

  I paid a small deposit for the photographic plates and left, puzzled as to why Rose had sent me.

  Later, Rose and I were in the gallery.

  She was looking at the Morisot on the wall, the Woman in White.

  “Why did you send me to Cailleux's?”

  “Think of it as a gift.”

  I did not understand. Rose sighed. “Max, you're too kind, too full of humility. I seem to share more with your father in this regard. We both doubt, calculate. What do you think of Cailleux's Matisses?”

  “Not as nice as ours,” I said.

  “And why not?”

  “They lack motion, fluidity,” I said.

  “That is your first thought—can you guess mine?” I shook my head. “They're forgeries.”

  “Not more fakes,” I said.

  Rose lowered her voice. “Your father will want to lose his mind and explode at Henri, and then he will have risked his contract altogether. Tell him to approach by telephoning Matisse and saying that Cailleux is selling fakes and that Daniel knows Henri isn't paid for them. That way, even if your father is wrong, he still looks like he's acting on the side of his artistic client, and he only confirms what all the artists think anyway: that dealers don't understand their art, they're just moneymen. No more.”

  I took this in unhappily, but followed Rose's scheme the next day. By April, her theory of the fakes was vindicated, and I had never seen my father so pleased with me.

  INCREASINGLY ROSE LET ME VISIT HER IN HER ROOM AT night. I tried to tell myself she acted out of desire, though I had come to suspect that Rose never possessed motives so simple. Sometimes we drew so close to each other that she would push me away with both hands, turn on the light, and pick up a comic—as if the levity of the material could soften her rejection. Worst of all, she might turn on the radio. Two foreign ministers, von Ribbentrop and Mussolini's son-in-law, made their alliance, and we all said the Italians were dirty and weak. May and June passed in this way. But I could think of nothing but Rose and the heat that radiated from her skin without my hand even touching it.

  “Why not?” I begged, one night in July.

  “It's reckless,” Rose said. “Everything could happen too fast.”

  “You make me feel like being reckless,” I said. Her face below me was so close her features blurred.

  “It's easy for a man to say that. I'm the one with something to lose.” A kiss on the forehead, maternal, without heat.

  My intentions were otherwise—that she would not lose, that I could save her from whatever strangeness she might have felt as employee, as sweetheart, as houseguest, as apprentice, and so on. We could run the gallery together.

  I had in my possession a family ring, its diamond modeled on the Dresden White.

  “For whom?” Mother had asked when I requested the jewel.

  “Rose, of course.”

  “I find it bad practice to give people what they do not want and then expect something in return,” she said.

  A ringing telephone woke the household at five-thirty the next morning. Mother, convinced it was news from Warsaw, answered in Polish. The caller hung up and rang back a moment later. I groaned, rolled over, and returned to my dream of playing tennis knee-deep in a field of mud.

  I heard a tap at the door and felt a cold touch against my cheek. There was Rose, pale and shaking in her dressing gown, sitting at the foot of the bed. In the town of Saint Etienne de Saint Geoirs, some 560 kilometers away in the Isère, her mother had suffered a stroke. She had been rushed to the hospital, where her life hung by a thread.

  “I have not spoken to my father in five years,” she said, “and there was his awful voice on the telephone. The train to Grenoble leaves tonight at ten and does not arrive until the next morning. I can't delay sixteen hours. Mother may not wait.”

  “We can drive the Delage,” I said, and she looked at me with a mix of fatigue and gratefulness. We left at quarter past six. It would be a twelve-hour drive if the tires held out.

  ROSE WAS SILENT FOR MOST OF THE TRIP. I NATTERED on about my dream from the night before; about my friend Bertrand, who always called me “old man,” and his mournful sister, Fanny; about a bullfight I had attended as a child; and so on.

  “Do you want me to be quiet?” I asked her, somewhere in the hills near Dijon.

  “God, no,” she said. “You're a wonderful radio that switches frequencies without me having to change the dial.” In another sixty kilometers, we did listen to the radio, but the news was nothing but reports of executions in Spain and whether the death toll was ten thousand or ten times that. Eventually, we switched back to my babbling and then, once it grew dark and my eyes tired of staring at the road, we were quiet. It seemed as if we were driving away from history and the talk of war.

  Once, I ventured, “You have never spoken of your father.”

  “He disapproves completely of my life. He didn't think I should even go to university. He did not go himself. One of those men perpetually resentful for not having had a son. Art, to him, is only an indulgence.”

  “That hardly seems a cause for such a falling out.”

  “It is my single true joy,” she said, and I felt a sadness at hearing this.

  The tires finally capitulated when we skidded over a cattle break on the outskirts of Saint Etienne de Saint Geoirs. We left the car, right side sagging, on the rutted road, and went the rest of the way by foot. Rose clung to my hand.

  We tiptoed on the strip of high ground between the muddy path and the farmer's fence to our left. We passed a stand of poplar trees, then a makeshift camp. A single child's shoe, without laces, waited by the road.

  A cobblestone square with a concrete fountain appeared before us. A café and a restaurant, both with grimy windows and tattered awnings, showed signs of life at either end of the plaza. One emitted tinny music. A dog trotted out of the other, pissed against the building's facade
, and hurried back into its bar. A monk in a cassock, with a rope around his middle, shuffled by.

  The hospital was only a few paces beyond the town square, behind a high wall. The first nun we met cried out with joy at seeing Rose. “You've grown so slender and chic! What a beautiful coat.” She caressed its sleeve in her childlike fingers. “Look at what Paris has done to you!” She herself wore the extraordinary habit typical of those days, her starched wimple like a winged ship.

  “Catherine, do you know where my mother is?” Rose asked.

  The young nun colored and her hand dropped to her rosary. “Look at me, going on about your coat. It's past the regular visiting hours, but I know she'll want to see you. I go in there and sing to her, and she watches me but doesn't say a thing. Your father hasn't come once. She's had no visitors but me, poor Madame Clément!”

  Rose inhaled sharply and I thought it a dangerous sound.

  We followed the young nun down a dim hallway. Her skirts streamed out over the varnished floor.

  “I'll go in first to tell her you're here,” the young nun said. “On account of her heart.”

  Once Catherine disappeared, Rose said, “I thought she might have died already.” I wiped her eyes with my handkerchief and she took it from me. “Will you stay outside when I see Mother, Max?” she asked. “She knows very little about my situation in Paris, and I want to explain it to her.” I agreed. After Catherine emerged and Rose replaced her, the novice offered to take me on a tour of the hospital grounds and gardens. Even though it was dark, some of the oldest buildings were still lit at night and, the young nun said, even prettier that way.

  She was twittery and gay as we strolled between the rows of herbs and vegetables in the kitchen orchards, gesturing with her hands so that the wide sleeves of her habit fell back to reveal plump, hairless arms. She reminded me of an uncooked biscuit. We returned to