The Color of Money

by Walter Tevis

  ***

  The best thing about it was the downtown location. He liked that with the same liking he had felt toward Arabella’s small apartment. It was a sizable room with a couple of closets, a countertop and a two-piece bath. There was a lot of light, with the glass front of the building and windows over a small garden in back. The garden was littered with rusted coat hangers from the dry cleaners that had occupied the place before; and it had an incongruously large brick barbecue over in the center of it, surrounded by trampled-down grass; but it might make a good place to put out some of Marcum’s steel ladies in the spring. When he suggested this to Arabella, she was excited by the idea and began picking up the coat hangers. The walls inside were grimy, and there were big pipes that would have to be painted over. The green linoleum on the floor would have to go. Bending to lift a piece of it away, Eddie could see that the floor beneath was good oak in need of sanding. You could probably have it done for two hundred, and then use polyurethane, which he could put on himself.

  He made a deal with Henry to rebate a hundred fifty from the first month’s rent—for paint, brushes, rollers and a ladder, along with the polyurethane for the floor. Eddie knew where to get the supplies at a discount, and he had them assembled by mid-afternoon. He used a pay phone on the corner to call the telephone company to get a business line put in. Then he called the electric company to turn on the current.

  “Maybe we ought to be locating our stock,” Arabella said.

  “We have to have the place ready before we put it in.” He was feeling terrific and he knew what needed to be done. He was wearing old jeans and a worn flannel shirt. He got down with a broad putty knife and began peeling up big flakes of linoleum, throwing them into a cardboard box. “I’ll get this crap off today. I’ve already talked to a floor refinishing place and they’ll be in with sanders tomorrow morning. We’ll scout out your artists the next day, while the varnish is drying, and then see what we’ll need in the way of stands for the sculpture, and track lights, and rods to hang quilts on the walls. We’ll figure out ads for the papers and a sign for out front.”

  “Eddie,” she said, “you’re a one-man band.”

  “Wait’ll you hear me do ‘Stars and Stripes Forever.’” The trick with the putty knife was to slide it in one smooth motion under the old linoleum. “This is going to be a first-class floor,” he said, working, pleased with himself.

  ***

  Ellen Clouse ran a one-pump gas station in Estill County, an hour and a half from Lexington. There was a three-room wooden house, badly in need of paint, attached; and all three rooms were full of quilts in dizzying patterns. A sign over her front door read “QUILTS FOR SALE—GENUINE KENTUCKY CRAFTS.”

  “I don’t make ’em myself,” Ellen said, “but there’s a half-dozen women do it for me. My mother quilted, but mostly I pump gas.” She was a broad, unsmiling woman in her fifties, with steel-gray hair and untied Adidas on her feet. “Some of these quilts is trash, but some are dazzlers. Look here…” She led them to one on the far wall. “This quilt is a Bible pictorial. There in the middle is the Hebrew children in the fiery furnace and that’s Abraham and Isaac in the bottom-right corner.”

  “Appliquéd,” Arabella said.

  “It’s the best way to do it, honey,” Ellen said. Her voice seemed surprisingly gentle for such a mannish woman. Eddie studied the quilt. It was divided into five brightly colored panels, with cloth cutouts of people and trees and a Noah’s ark and the curving flames from the furnace in the middle. The stitches that held it all together were fine and even. It was a good-looking thing once you got past the gaudiness, and it would take a lot of hours to make it. He looked at her. “How much is it?”

  “That quilt was made by Betty Jo Merser over at Irvine, and she’s dead. Died last year of cancer of the Fallopian tubes. She wanted five hundred for it.”

  “It’s a valuable quilt,” Arabella said.

  “Let’s see some more of the best ones, Miss Clouse,” Eddie said.

  She took them through the three rooms, where the walls were covered with quilts. In the third room there was a pile of them twenty or thirty deep, on an old wooden bed. There were coverlets and pillowcases too. Most of the decorations fell into one of two kinds: patriotic and religious. A few mixed the two of them; one of these had Jesus in a manger with the American flag overhead. One patriotic quilt showed crudely cut-out airplanes, with the legend REMEMBER PEARL HARBOR. It was signed, and dated in 1943.

  By the third or fourth one, Eddie felt he could look at them and pick out the ones that were genuinely good. It was partly a matter of design and partly of construction. Some of them were cheap and random, but others—especially those made by the dead Betty Jo Merser—had a lot of energy to them and good, tight workmanship. But he had no idea how much money they were worth.

  Just as this was beginning to bother him, there was the sound of a car horn outside and Ellen excused herself to wait on a gas customer.

  When she had left, Eddie walked over to the Bible pictorial and felt its cloth. “How much could we sell this for?” he said.

  “I’m not sure,” Arabella said.

  “Do you know anyone in Lexington who has some of these, or some like them?”

  “The woman who lays out the magazine has quilts. I don’t know where she got them.”

  “And she’ll have books?”

  “She must have.”

  “That’s good enough. We can go see her after I varnish the floor.”

  ***

  With the finish dry, the floor looked even better than he had hoped. He had bought good interior white and a heavy roller. He put out drop cloths, set up a ladder and did the ceiling. It might need touching up after the lights were put in, but he could do that easily. The ceiling was done by noon and he started the walls. Arabella bought Windex and paper towels at the corner drugstore and started on the windows.

  The telephone had come and now sat on the drop cloths in the middle of the floor. During a break Eddie sat by it with coffee and a Big Mac and called a sign-painting place from the Yellow Pages. It would cost four hundred for a board sign to hang over the door, and a hundred thirty to have KENTUCKY FOLK ART GALLERY painted in gold letters on the window. He told them just to do the window. Then he got his roller and went back to the walls. Arabella did the rest of the windows and then started picking up trash in the yard. After Eddie finished the second wall his shoulder was aching; he rested it while he scrubbed up the lavatory bowl and toilet. The money would go out alarmingly for a while; but you had to be prepared to put up money when you gambled, and that didn’t bother him. He got some of Arabella’s Windex and polished up the bathroom fixtures, cleaned the mirror over the sink. He began to whistle. There would be furniture, and stands for display, and the lights and installing them. But Arabella was right. A place like this could really go. With Arabella talking to the customers, with her looks and her accent, and with her connections at the university, they might take off. Even if they didn’t it would be exciting for a while. And it beat trying to get back his lost pool game or working for Mayhew at the goddamned university recreation room.

  Jane Smith-Ross had a big pictorial on the wall over her fireplace, with lambs and cows in a field. Eddie looked closely at the appliqués and at the stitching. The stitches were not as small or as neat as Betty Jo Merser’s. Maybe they could get an old photograph of Betty Jo and have it blown up and put it on the wall, with her birth and death dates. Make her into a kind of quilt celebrity. Who knew anything about such people, anyway? Looking at this one over the Smith-Ross mantelpiece, he felt a proprietary feeling about Betty Jo’s work. It was better than this.

  “Can you tell me what you paid for it?” he asked.

  “My husband bought it for my birthday four years ago. It’s from the nineteen thirties and I think he paid eight hundred dollars.”

  “Do you know where he bought it, Jane?” Arabella asked.

  “I sure do,” Jane said with a little laugh. “It’s
ironic. It’s a Kentucky quilt, but Dalton bought it in Cincinnati, at Shillito’s.”

  Eddie looked at it again. The figures were not as good as Betty Jo’s; the sheep were stupid-looking and there was no imagination to the cows. Betty Jo’s fiery furnace had looked hot, and each leaf of flame had character. It wasn’t as old as this one—Ellen Clous had said it was done in the fifties—but if this was worth eight hundred, Betty Jo’s was worth a thousand. At Shillito’s, anyway.

  Jane Smith-Ross had two picture books on quilting to lend him; that night he studied them carefully. There was no doubt about it: Betty Jo Merser was a find. The whole problem would be marketing. He would hire someone to install the track lights and to put shelves along one wall; he wanted to start dealing with Ellen Clouse for all the Betty Jo Merser quilts she had. The fiery-furnace one would look terrific on the freshly painted white wall on the left as you came in the door. They could hang two or three of them and store the rest on shelves, like pool-table cloths. If you put Deeley Marcum’s statue of the Las Vegas Model on the floor—that newly varnished oak floor—to one side of it and a few feet out from the wall, the two of them would go together just right. Thinking about it, his heart began to beat faster.

  ***

  He had no difficulty getting a carpenter and an electrician. Everybody needed work, and it was wintertime. But when he talked to the electrician about an alarm system for the windows, the man said he didn’t know anything about that. Eddie called a place from the Yellow Pages, but no one answered. He decided to worry about it later and left the man installing track lights in the ceiling while the carpenter was cutting boards for the shelves. Arabella got license applications at City Hall and began calling her friends to tell them about the shop, starting the word-of-mouth. He left the men working and went to the newspaper office to talk about advertising. He had run a few ads for his poolroom from time to time, but they had been simple cuts. He needed something for the gallery opening that would look elegant. And there was radio and TV. Enoch—or his secretary—might be able to help with that. Maybe he could get Arabella on the morning show, to talk about Kentucky folk art. And then they had to look into the other artists: they would need to stock more than metal statues and quilts.

  It did not seem crazy, or even strange, for him to be doing what he was doing. Art had never meant anything to him, and he had never been in an art gallery or museum in his life. But what he was doing felt like a hustle and he liked the notion of a hustle, liked putting his mind into it. It was in the service of money, and he loved money—loved dealing with it, loved making it, using it, having a dozen or more large denomination bills, folded, deep in his pocket. So much in his life did not make sense. But money did.

  “We could take the quilts on consignment and not have to put up any money,” Arabella said. They were driving toward Irvine.

  “That means we don’t pay Ellen in advance?”

  “Right.”

  “How does she know we have a better way of selling than she does?”

  “You talk her into it.”

  He drove silently for a while, pushing the two-year-old Toyota pretty hard. He had been thinking of a panel truck or Microbus, with KENTUCKY FOLK ART GALLERY on the side, along with a logo of Marcum’s woman-and-dog in profile. He thought about Arabella’s idea for a moment and then said, “We’d have to give her at least half, and I want to go for broke. I want to buy a quilt for three hundred and sell it for nine. Otherwise it’s not worth our time.”

  “What about poor Ellen?”

  “Poor Ellen? In the first place Ellen didn’t make the quilts, and in the second she hasn’t been able to sell them at that dump with the Esso pump and the kerosene stoves. If you want to feel sorry for somebody, make it Betty Jo Merser. Ellen’s the robber baron of this enterprise, not its victim.”

  “You should be teaching economics at the university instead of shooting straight pool.”

  “A person learns about money shooting straight pool.”

  “Eddie,” Arabella said, “you’re driving too fast.”

  He said nothing but did not slow down.

  ***

  “I’ll give you twenty-seven hundred for all nine.” Eddie had that much in cash and he set it on a little table with a doily on it near the fireplace.

  “You’re being silly,” Ellen said. “That’s the whole lot of Betty Merser’s life’s work, and any five of them’s worth that much.”

  “They’re not making you anything hanging on the walls here.”

  “Let me get you folks some tea,” Ellen said. She went into the kitchen. She didn’t even look at the money.

  “Eddie,” Arabella whispered, “you’re going to have to pay more or get fewer quilts.”

  “We’ll see.” He had his eyes on the fiery furnace above the fireplace, with the three black-haired children tied with ropes about to be shoveled in. He could get twelve hundred for that quilt if he could find the right buyer.

  When Ellen came back carrying a tray with mugs of tea on it, Eddie said, “What do you think all nine of them are worth?”

  “You’re downright serious about those quilts, aren’t you?”

  “I like the workmanship.” He took a cup from the tray.

  Ellen nodded but said nothing. They sat with their tea for a while and then, abruptly, she stood up, smoothing out her heavy corduroy skirt. “Maybe you’d like to see what her mother did.”

  Eddie looked up at her. “Her mother?”

  “Betty Jo’s. She passed away before the war.”

  “And she did quilts?”

  “She’s the one taught Betty Jo. Leah Daphne Merser was the best quilter around.”

  “Where are they?” Eddie said.

  “In the bedroom.” She walked through the door to the right of the fireplace. “There’s only three.”

  There was a wooden chest at the foot of the bed. Ellen opened this and took out a sheet that covered what was inside. Under this was a quilt wrapped in a clear plastic garment bag. She took it out of the chest with care, set it on the bed, eased it out of the bag and began unfolding it. As it opened up Arabella began to hold her breath.

  “I’ve had these a long time,” Ellen said. “There was a dealer from New York going to buy them back when Betty Jo was alive, but I never heard from him. I wasn’t all that fond of selling. Don’t know if I am yet.”

  Eddie stepped closer to look. He had spent several hours with Jane Smith-Ross’s books, looking at the detailed illustrations carefully. This quilt was the real thing. It was trapunto, with flowers and birds in appliqué, and the stitching was as delicate as that in any of the pictures. He remembered one in the book that the legend said belonged to the Museum of American Folk Art in New York; the book gave it two pages, in color, and another page to show details of the stitching. This one was better. He picked an end of it up gently; the cloth was smooth and light, and the quilting of flower petals was flawless. He looked over at Ellen. “I’d like to see the others.”

  ***

  “Seven thousand dollars!” Arabella said.

  “In for a dime, in for a dollar,” Eddie said. He was driving just at the limit. In back of him, wrapped individually in plastic, were the nine quilts of Betty Jo Merser and the three exquisite ones of her mother. He felt fine. He always liked raising the bet.

  ***

  “If you get sprinklers in, I’ll write it. Otherwise I just can’t.”

  “Sprinklers?” Eddie said. That was one thing he hadn’t thought of. “How much is that going to cost?”

  “Plenty. But I can’t write you a policy without them. Not on those quilts. Not on any of these things.”

  “I’ll look into it,” Eddie said, shaking his head.

  ***

  “I need to take two weeks off.” Eddie was standing by the newly covered Number Four. Mayhew had just come in.

  “Can’t do it,” Mayhew said.

  “You ran this place without me before I came.”

  Mayhew looked at him and
said nothing.

  Eddie wanted to hit him, but instead he lit a cigarette. Then he said, “I’ve earned it.”

  “There was a lot of wear in those old cloths,” Mayhew said, not looking at him. “I didn’t ask you to put new ones on.”

  Eddie looked at him. “They were worn out.”

  Mayhew opened up the cash register and began counting the bills.

  “I’ll see you in two weeks,” Eddie said, turning to leave. There was only one pool game going on, on Number Three. Two silent young blacks were shooting nine-ball.

  “No you won’t,” Mayhew said, not looking at him.

  Eddie said nothing and walked to the door.

  “If you’re not back tomorrow, you’re not coming back,” Mayhew said.

  Eddie walked out the door and past PacMan and Space Invaders. Outside it had begun to snow. He would have to go back sometime; his Balabushka was there.

  ***

  “Eddie,” Arabella said, “I’m scared.”

  “Scared?”

  “It’s all been so fast. We don’t know if we’ll be able to sell these things.”

  It was almost midnight; they had just come from painting the wooden stands and trying out the track lights. The lettering on the glass in front had been finished that afternoon. They would open Saturday.

  “It’s going to work,” he said.

  She sat heavily on the white sofa. “I hope so,” she said. She leaned her head against the back of the sofa and closed her eyes. “Sometimes you go at it in a way that scares me. Headlong.”

  He didn’t speak for a minute, looking at her tired face with the eyes still closed. “I held back all the time I was married and running the poolroom. I just sat tight and watched television a lot. It wasn’t any good.”

  She opened her eyes wearily. “Maybe not.”

  “It wasn’t any good at all. Martha and I didn’t do anything. We drank too much and bought things for the house and every now and then we had a fight. I went out to the poolroom every morning and brushed down the tables and put out fresh chalk and after a while I was fifty years old.” He stubbed out his cigarette in the ashtray by the chair. “There aren’t many things I can do. I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to play pool again well enough to make money from it; and even if I can get the money to buy another poolroom, I don’t know if that’s what I want. It’ll just be more of the same.”