Mary McCarthy

by Thomas Mallon

  At any rate, the more friendly Mr. Sheer became with the boys, the more chilly Mrs. La Plante’s manner grew. Mr. Sheer thought it over. He would take a leaf out of their book, he decided, and expose the boys to Mrs. La Plante. He got hold of a night-club proprietor, a former theatrical associate of the dead Mr. La Plante, and primed him to visit Mrs. La Plante and make her the following speech. “Mrs. La Plante, it has come to my ears that you are associating with Fred So-and-So, Ernest So-and-So, and another of their ilk. Mrs. La Plante, I could hardly believe it to be true when my good friend, Mr. Sheer, informed me of the fact. Mr. Sheer, of course, is an unworldly man, and he knew nothing against the boys. He told me of your friendship merely as a matter of interest. But I myself am a worldly man. I have heard of these men, and I tell you, Mrs. La Plante, Peter La Plante would turn over in his grave if he knew of this. Why, Mrs. La Plante, those men are degenerates, those men are homosexuals!”

  The night-club proprietor did go out to Long Beach and faithfully delivered the warning. Unfortunately, the whole thing fell extraordinarily flat owing to the fact that Mrs. La Plante did not know what a homosexual was, and, as the night-club man pointed out later, it was no use at her age trying to tell her. After this, Mr. Sheer gave up again. For a second time, the toy spaniel necklace had to be abandoned, and the office was quiet once more.

  It was about this time that the telephone was shut off. The boys with their long-distance calls had given it the coup de grâce. We carried on without it, increasing, to make up for our inaccessibility, the volume of our correspondence. But after ten days of this our stationery was used up, and the stationers declined to print any more until the bill had been paid. We were now completely cut off from the outside world, and, though Mr. Sheer finally discovered a stationer who would give him credit, a week went by while we waited for the new paper to be finished, a week during which I did nothing—it was September now, but too hot even to read in the office. When at last it came, it did not, as Mr. Sheer said, have the same quality as the old; still, he was prepared to make the best of it. I was just starting on a new series of letters when they came and took the typewriter away.

  The typewriter had seemed to me the one solid, permanent object in the gallery, but this, too, did not belong to Mr. Sheer. It had been rented from an agency.

  I decided to quit. The means of performing my duties no longer existed; I had been rendered impotent by creditors. Working for Mr. Sheer, moreover, had come to be a luxury for me. I had not been paid for some time, and I was supplying Mr. Sheer with a stream of nickels and dimes which he poured into the pay-telephone box in the lobby of the building. Also I had got to know Mr. Sheer so well that it was impossible for me to leave the gallery at six and carry with me the conviction that he had no way of getting a meal. So, unless one of us had another invitation, I had fallen into the habit of buying his dinner. Mr. Sheer was a connoisseur of the eighty-five-cent table d’hôte restaurants. We would eat and he would tell me stories of his past. It was not until much later that I realized how extraordinarily happy Mr. Sheer had been all through that terrible summer. At the time, I was sorry for him in the conventional way, but still I could not afford it. And, in any case, I told myself, it was just a question of time before the pack caught up with Mr. Sheer, and, somehow, I did not want to be in at the kill.

  Yet, after I had quit, when I would come back to see him, Mr. Sheer would still be there, the colored boy would still be there, and, as I have said, another girl would be in my place, with another typewriter. I would always scan the building directory downstairs to see if the Savile Galleries were still listed. For a long time they were, but then one day not a week after I had seen Mr. Sheer, the name was gone, and there was no forwarding address. The lifebelt, I presumed, had broken.

  But it was not quite over. More than a year later I discovered him by accident in a much larger and more impressive gallery tucked away in an arcade off Forty-seventh Street. He was still wearing the same suit, and the new gallery was like an enlargement of the old. He had taken Elmer and the red and green velvet drapes with him, the rooms were dark, and the priests’ robes glimmering down from the walls seemed exactly the same. I noticed a few horse sculptures, which were a departure, and there was a new and curious collection of Louis Quinze love seats, rented, he said, from a theatrical warehouse.

  I complimented him on his new surroundings.

  “I’ll be evicted any day,” he whispered.

  But he was in buoyant spirits. He showed me a pocketful of summonses as another man might have flashed a bankroll. There must have been twenty of them at least. “I think they’ve got me this time,” he said, and forced his face to assume that funereal expression that he felt the decorum of his predicament required.

  “People tell me I ought to go into bankruptcy. But I hate to do it now. Did you see those horse sculptures?” I nodded. “It’s a big thing, Miss Sargent, much bigger than the dogs. I’ve made a lot of wonderful new contacts, and I’d hate to go through court now. You know, Miss Sargent, there are a lot of things I wouldn’t like to have come out. Nothing wrong, you know, but . . .”

  “Yes,” I said.

  Two days later he was in jail. He telephoned me from there to ask if I could advance him a hundred dollars. He had failed to meet payments on a judgment against him, and the sheriff had picked him up for contempt of court.

  I was sorry, I said, but I really didn’t have a hundred dollars.

  “I didn’t think you would, Miss Sargent. I just thought you’d like to hear about it. There are people here that have been here for years. Mostly alimony cases. You’d get a kick out of it.”

  If he could wait a day, I said, I would try to raise the money for him.

  “No,” he answered doubtfully, “I don’t want to do that. There’s a kind of stigma attached to spending the night in jail. . . .”

  The next day he was gone. The debt had been paid at three in the morning, they told me at the jail. I hurried up to the fine new gallery, but he was not there. A furniture van was parked out in front, the gallery door was open, and most of the hangings had been taken off the walls. The phone was ringing through the empty rooms. On an irrational, hopeful impulse I ran to answer it, thinking how providential if now at the ultimate moment this should be the Big Sale that would save him. But it was a sweet-voiced girl from the telephone company asking about the bill. I would speak to Mr. Sheer, I said; it was doubtless an oversight. I waited all afternoon, till the last familiar vase had been carted off, till they took away the chair I was sitting on, but he did not come back, and no one knew where he had gone.

  Several years later, as I was coming out of a theater one night, a man touched my elbow. There was something furtive about the gesture, and I turned indignantly. I faced an apotheosis of Mr. Sheer, tall and ruddy, barbered and tailored, exuding a faint, chic fragrance of Caron’s “Pour l’Homme.” The radiant prosperity of his appearance led me to conclude at once that he had returned to that mysterious underworld from which he had come. There was a pathos of moral defeat about the idea; nevertheless, it was a relief to think that Mr. Sheer had at last ceased to strive.

  But he was handing me a card he had selected from his breast pocket, and on it I read the name of a reputable antique dealer, and below it, in smaller letters, the words, I. F. SHEER, THE SPORTSMAN’S CORNER.

  It was true. He took me around at midnight to see the place, and there was his private office paneled in knotty pine, his secretary’s cubbyhole next to it, and two rooms full of objects of every sort, sculptures in wood and bronze, tapestries, vases, urns, silk panels and screens, rings and earrings, book-ends and doorstops—all of them dealing with a single theme, sport through the ages. There was a Persian horse that anticipated the one that was later shown in the great Persian Exhibition; and in a glass case a gold Cretan dagger with a boar hunt on it. The medieval tapestries and the Japanese cloisonné enamels depicted various aspects of the chase, and a good-sized modern bronze showed a wrestling match
in progress. “I’ve got everything,” he said in a jubilant whisper, “except an Egyptian tomb painting.” It was true. He had really covered the subject. And what was most remarkable to me was the fact that all these objects had an air of expensive authenticity. I believed in the Persian horse; I could almost believe in the dagger. He showed me over the main gallery, which was even more emphatically, quietly elegant. The collection was miscellaneous—he pointed out a dinner service that had belonged to Franz Joseph, some Pisanello medallions of the Este family, an early rosary, and a prie-dieu that he said had been used by Queen Elizabeth. Yet, ill-assorted as these objects were, they had been tellingly arranged: there was nothing here to suggest the auction room or the second-hand shop. When I had seen the gallery, he had me admire the clothes he was wearing, and they, too, were the McCoy, suit by Tripler, shirt by McLaughlin, tie by Sulka, down to the socks by Saks Fifth Avenue.

  Yet there was something about that night in that dark gallery, lit only by reflectors shining down on tapestries and gold lacquer panels, about Mr. Sheer as he tiptoed from room to room on thick-piled carpets, that made me, following at his heels, feel like a prowler. All the while he was telling me how he came to be there, how the Hermitage Galleries had lifted him out of the gutter and made him a salesman, how he had sold and sold until he was head of his own department, how he would soon become a partner, all that while I had a strong sense that we had no right to be there, I was listening for the knock of the night watchman who would order us away.

  His success story seemed to me incredible and I could see, by his excitement in relating it, that he found it so too. Later on, when I saw him in daylight, ingratiating with customers, man-to-man with his partners, authoritative to the office girls, I could believe it and even find reasons to justify it—he had been hired, of course, because in his way he had been a pioneer, selling bric-a-brac to rich dog and horse people who, under ordinary circumstances, could never have been induced to set foot in a dealer’s gallery. With his dog crystals he had built up a new sort of clientele, whom he now carried along with him on his great voyage of discovery. And it was precisely his character as a discoverer that endeared him to his clients, gauche and untried themselves in the mysteries of connoisseurship. How, they must have asked themselves, could this man trick us as they say art dealers do; he is too ill-informed, too naïve, in fact too much like ourselves.

  But Mr. Sheer did not understand the reasons for his success, and therefore it made him uneasy. That night I could see that he, too, felt like a trespasser on those well-appointed, cultured premises, and this sense of unlawful entry filled him with both shame and pride. He was moving out of the sporting field, he said; already he was dickering for a tapestry that had been designed by Rembrandt; in the goldsmith’s field there was Cellini; in bronze, Verrocchio and Donatello. And there were even bigger things to be done. Look at the stuff Hearst had bought, whole rooms at a time. And this fellow who had made a fortune selling the Romanoff collection. . . . But as his voice rose with the great names, there was apprehension in it. The new merchandise would bring new problems. With the sporting subjects he knew where he stood: it was easy enough to demonstrate the points of a hound. But what, exactly, were the points of a Cellini?

  He wanted me, he said, to teach him.

  I agreed that night to give him lessons in good English, and in the jargon of art criticism, though I privately felt that it would be the ruin of his career if he ever learned how to patronize his customers.

  Fortunately for Mr. Sheer, as a student he did not make rapid progress. Our lessons would take place at lunch, at dinner, at the theater, or, often, late at night or on Sunday afternoon, in the dark, empty gallery. I tried to teach him terms like Byzantine and baroque, but, as I soon discovered, he was chiefly interested in acquiring a string of hyperbolical adjectives to describe his stock. And it was more important to him to learn how to pronounce Longchamps correctly than to memorize the parts of speech.

  It was something different from good English, I began to realize, that he wanted from me.

  When he passed into the final stage of his business development and became a partner, Mr. Sheer achieved his ambition—to enter a rich man’s house by the front door, as a guest. First there had been stag evenings with visiting Middle Western businessmen, but before long, at Aiken, at Palm Beach, on Long Island, Mr. Sheer would now and then be included in the larger cocktail parties. Deeply as he desired these invitations, he could only enjoy them in anticipation and in retrospect. The parties themselves were torture for him. His fear of committing a solecism combined with his shyness in crowds to bleach his conversation to an unnatural neutrality. On the offensive, he restricted himself to the most general statements about politics, the weather, the women’s dresses, the state of business; on the defensive, he held off his interlocutor with all the Really’s and You-don’t-say’s and the Well-isn’t-that-interesting’s of the would-be Good Listener.

  Still, this was the apogee of his career, and he knew it. What puzzled him, what at first he could hardly believe, was the fact that he was unhappy. He grew more and more dependent on the evenings we would spend together, exchanging stories of the disreputable old days. “Margaret,” he would tell me, “it’s a funny thing, but you’re the only person I have a good time with any more.” He explained this by saying that he could “be himself” with me, but there was more to it than that. For one thing, I was dear to him because I was the only one who knew. In my mind he could see as in his own the two Mr. Sheers, the pale, perspiring Mr. Sheer of the past and the resplendent Mr. Sheer of the present. The wonderful, miraculous contrast was alive in me as it was in no one else. What was becoming infinitely saddening to him in his own success story was that he could never allow anyone to know what a success story it was. The old Mr. Sheer had to be kept under cover, and his new friends could only presume that the present Mr. Sheer had sprung full-blown from the head of the Hermitage Galleries.

  Moreover, though in the first flush of success, at the time of his greatest happiness, the two Mr. Sheers must have been equally alive and equally vigorous, now in the daily atmosphere of respectability, the old Mr. Sheer was atrophying. Mr. Hyde had turned into Dr. Jekyll, and it required the strongest drugs to get him to go back to his original state. The reminiscences we exchanged were but one of the drugs. Mr. Sheer tried a number of other methods.

  In the first place, as I have said, he liked to haunt the gallery out of business hours. Where he had once felt genuinely like a trespasser, he now tried to revive that feeling by imitating the behavior that went with it. But no policeman, no Holmes Protective man, ever halted him, no matter what time of night he came, for now the Fifty-seventh Street police knew him and greeted him with respect.

  He produced another imitation of his former character by moving back and forth from one hotel to another. One week he would be at the St. Regis, the next at the Gotham, the next at the Weylin, and so on, until he had made the rounds of the second-string fashionable hotels, when he would start over again. But this elusiveness was synthetic, for now his secretary could always find him. His position as a successful man required that.

  In the same way, he would try to inject a little color into his business life by the practice of minor chicaneries. Any large-scale operations were out of the question, for the bookkeeper kept the accounts and handled the money. But he could concoct fabulous histories of the pieces he sold, could suppress an undesirable attribution, could add a signature where none had been before, and happily obliterate what he felt were picayune distinctions between period replicas and originals by a master. He could also reveal business confidences and make promises that were impossible to keep. If he could have had his way, every sale would have been a little conspiracy: in his eyes, the price being equal, it was better to sell a Gobelin tapestry as a Beauvais than to sell it as a Gobelin. I have even watched him trying to persuade himself (and this was the inevitable first step in the process of deception) that a Degas bronze was not a Degas
at all, but a Rodin.

  Yet, like his personal elusiveness, this slipperiness in business was largely unreal. In the first place, it was unnecessary: he had reached a point in his career where the things he handled could be sold on their merits. In the second place, though it should have been dangerous, though indeed he desired it to be dangerous, his secretary and his partners kept a diligent watch over him to prevent him from hurting himself. They were always ready to intervene with “Mr. Sheer made a mistake, he has so many things on his mind, we will correct the error.” He was in the position of a rich kleptomaniac whose family is perpetually on hand to turn her thefts into purchases.