The Saint Maurice, anyway, became the gem of the Warren collection. Hank, of course, insisted on my attribution, as there had been a number of El Greco copies hawked about, and I had no hesitation in this case in giving it to him, nor has it ever been questioned. But our conversation at the restaurant had an interesting impact on my relationship with Leila. It cemented my conviction that the bond that tied us so securely together was that we were both aesthetes who lived primarily for the satisfaction of our artistic tastes. Nothing really mattered to either of us but the quest of the perfect thing. Leila would have bought that picture had its authenticity been challenged by a hundred experts. The thing was in itself perfection.
Subsequent revelations of my private negotiations with art dealers over the provenance of paintings they sold to the Warrens have raised doubts as to whether the price paid didn't sway some of my convictions, and it is certainly true that my concern has been more with the quality of a picture than with its origin. Indeed, I have never thought the law should protect a purchaser who questions the latter. He bought that particular object, didn't he? He could see it and feel it and smell it, couldn't he? The future will probably contain methods of reproducing masterpieces so faultless that no expert will be able to distinguish them from the originals. Indeed, that time has almost come. The doctor in whose sanatorium van Gogh languished so long did copies of his patient's work that baffle the keenest eyes today. Yet the difference in the price can be high in the millions. What nonsense!
Have some of my attributions been affected by the lure of profit? Could I have been tempted, for example, to promote a Francesco Pesellino to a Fra Filippo Lippi to satisfy a lover of Robert Browning's famous monologue? I suppose it's possible. The subconscious is much played up these days, and the lifestyle of my later years has certainly been costly. But I have never recommended anything but great works of art.
Once and once only have I given an opinion that was directly contrary to what I truly believed. As it caused my ultimate break with Hank Warren, though his wife took no part in his decision to cancel my retainer, I will relate here what happened.
Once again we were faced with an El Greco, or what purported to be an El Greco, supposedly an early example of his Venetian period. It depicted the taking of Christ's garments by the Roman soldiers, a subject later more magnificently treated by the artist in his famous El Spolio in the Toledo cathedral. But the treatment in the picture in question was very different.
The hall in which Christ was about to be stripped had the ornate grandeur of a Veronese palace, and its great arches opened to a sky of a lovely cerulean blue. The soldiers laying their hands on the patient, heaven-gazing Jesus were scantily clad, some actually naked, and very handsome and muscular, totally unlike the grotesque, skinny, sexless nudes of the later El Greco, but in making my attribution I had to take into consideration that in his Italian period he was almost a realist. What convinced me that it was not an El Greco was that the soldiers were not shown as either cruel or indifferent. They appeared to be fascinated by the very garments they were tearing off their victim, particularly the scarlet robe that dominated the center of the picture like a great glittering ruby. Despite all its action the painting had some of the serene stillness that Poussin was later to bring even to such scenes of carnage as the massacre of the innocents. The spirit of the artist's conception was totally unlike anything El Greco had ever done, so, despite the similarity of many of its details to his early Venetian paintings, I was convinced that it was not the work of the Toledo master. But it was a masterpiece. It might even have been a Titian.
Leila was not of my opinion. She was totally and enthusiastically convinced that it was a genuine El Greco, and she had to have it.
"It bears out my theory!" she exclaimed. "The soldiers are not capable of receiving the inner flame, but they are able to sense its presence in one who does. They might be trying to warm their hands against the fire of that red robe!"
The price demanded was stiff, and Hank insisted on my unqualified opinion. I gave it. I wanted his wife to have that beautiful picture. Hank accepted my attribution and bought it. Later, when a dealer whom I had mistakenly regarded as a friend but who was actually intent on stealing the Warrens from me betrayed to Hank the doubts that I had indiscreetly admitted to him, Hank never mentioned the matter but ceased forever all business dealings with me. Leila, to whom I am sure he confided his outrage, continued as a friend to discuss her collection with me. If she knew about the El Greco, even if she had come to my conclusion about it, she didn't care. She had what she wanted.
She and I were soul mates.
An Hour and a Lifetime
LINDA GRISWOLD HAD always rather tended to assume that by age twenty-seven she would be a comfortably wed matron, the mother of a couple of tots, with an attractive apartment in New York, a cottage for summers and weekends in a fashionable New York suburb, and a handsome, or at least charming, husband who worked "downtown": a life, in short, that was a replica, if on a minor scale, of her family's rather grander one. And yet in 1943, in the middle of a world war, she found herself married, and to a handsome husband, it was true, but he was not downtown: he was a naval officer on sea duty in the North Atlantic, and she, still not a mother, was hard at work as the civilian secretary-assistant to the district intelligence officer at the headquarters of the Pacific Sea Frontier, in Balboa in the Panama Canal Zone. It was a kind of success, perhaps, for a woman of her protected background, but certainly not the one she had envisaged.
Yet the significant thing in her life was that she had always expected success. From her teens on she had been in the habit of giving herself over to private gusts of exhilaration. Life was not only going to be good; it was going to be better and better. Let war clouds gather over Europe, let Hitler and Mussolini rant and rave; at home in a nation that had so gallantly pulled itself out of a deep depression, the future was still secure from foreign isms. She had beauty and health and money and, what was much more important, the will to enjoy them.
She had known Thad Griswold all her life; their families had adjoining country estates in Westbury, Long Island. He was blond, handsome, athletic, and of a sunny disposition; his innate decency and the evident sincerity of his admiration for intellects superior to his own—and she certainly recognized that such existed—went a good way to make up for his deficiencies in wit and imagination. Not that he was stupid. Far from it. He had common sense and industriousness, and he knew how to apply himself to any given task. As her father said, such a man might go far in a bank, and he had taken Thad on in his. The very appropriateness of his and Linda's union seemed to further her habitual optimism, though she privately admitted it might well have had the opposite effect. She was sure when she married him—a virgin, as were most of her friends—that the physical side of wedlock would be all a girl could hope for. She imagined that this would cover a multitude of other things, and for a good while it did. She indignantly thrust into the back of her mind the nasty crack of a cynical old bachelor friend: "An excellent first marriage."
As war broke out in Europe not long after their wedding and the eventual entry of America into hostilities was generally expected, the young Griswolds agreed to postpone starting a family, and when Thad, a reserve officer, was called up for sea duty, Linda decided to take a job. She knew shorthand and typing, and when a cousin of her mother's, a regular navy captain stationed as an intelligence officer at the district headquarters on Church Street, suggested that she work for him as a secretary and general assistant, she jumped at the chance. Was it not patriotic as well as interesting? And so absorbed did she become in the job and so indispensable to her boss that when he was ordered to the Canal Zone to become district intelligence officer there and asked if she would go with him if he could arrange it, she cheerfully agreed—though to her family's distress and Thad's mild but distant objections. With Thad on the waves and she overseas, what a striking war couple they would make! Success might have strange ways of showing its
elf, but here it was!
The shimmering heat of Balboa and the dull green military buildings of the headquarters of the Pacific Sea Frontier, so little relieved by the brash pink and yellow of neighboring Panama City or by the too-distant lush greenness of the isthmus jungle, were disheartening to her, but the real blow came when, after only a year in his new job, her boss was transferred to sea duty. Linda thought at first that she would go home, but the new district intelligence officer, whom she liked, begged her to stay on, and she decided in the end that it was her patriotic duty to do so.
Left alone, as she felt it, in the Canal Zone, she soon wondered if her first idea had not been the right one. All around her the atmosphere was becoming as dry as the air in the months of rainlessness. What had been a gallant and united military outpost excitingly threatened by a cruel oriental power had become the routine station for supplies and transport for victorious American forces driving a distant foe to greater distances. The officers and men who guarded the canal from a less and less likely repetition of Pearl Harbor had never had, and now never would have, and probably didn't even want, combat duty. They idled through their humdrum tasks and spent their evenings in bordellos in Panama City or in bars talking about sex. Everlastingly about sex! Linda had given up going out at night even with respectable-looking officers who knew or pretended to know connections of hers at home. Such engagements, despite her announced married state and usually their own, seemed invariably to end in a spurned pass. She had no friends among the female staff at naval headquarters; they were all—or at least they so struck her—dull Canal Zone daughters intent on catching a husband to take them to the blessed North when the war was over. Besides, they regarded her as a snob. And they were right!
Making matters worse was the daily transit from the Caribbean to the Pacific of the great gray vessels of war on their way to swell the now invincible flotillas sweeping the Japanese from the seas. Linda's boss sometimes took her with him when he called on the commanding officer of one of these, and her spirits would rise at the sight of so many fighting men. But when she returned to her office, her brief elation would be punctured. For what cause were they risking their brave young lives? For the sleaziness of the zone, which she was beginning to equate with what she saw as the sleaziness of America, of the West, of everything? Were those bleak historians correct in thinking, like Brooks Adams, the subject of her major thesis at Vassar, that human civilization was glorious only in its fighting warriors, that peaceful eras degenerated into mere money grubbing and sexual incontinence? Even the New York of her younger days now took on in her fantasies some of the aspects of an academic painting of Rome in decline, with men in togas and women in less lolling on couches at a banquet, waiting fatalistically for the barbarians to arrive.
It was through Stuart Fraser that she met Conrad Vogt. Fraser, whom she had known in New York in her debutante days, was a third secretary at the American Embassy in Panama; he was bright but pompous, witty and self-important, and so much the gentleman that she would never have to tell him to keep his hands to himself. His conduct was always scrupulously correct, and on the rare occasions (his social calendar was a busy one) when he asked her to dine with him at the Union Club, she accepted with mild pleasure. At least she would not have to frown and shake her head at unwanted solicitations.
Once he brought with him an old college friend in transit of the canal, a lieutenant attached to a submarine temporarily delayed in Balboa for minor adjustments. Vogt immediately struck Linda as a man of considerable magnetism, exercised mainly by large and rather brooding dark eyes in a very pale skin under a high brow and thick, shiny, ebony hair. His figure was a bit slight but well formed, and she could see, when he rose from their table to answer a telephone call from his ship, that he moved with the coordinated grace of a Gallic or Italian aristocrat. His voice was soft and low; he gave the appearance of a controlled gentleness that in no way suggested weakness or pliability but rather their opposite. In the course of a rather animated conversation between the three of them, he managed to redeem for Linda much of the disgust into which her Panamanian séjour had sunk his sex.
She liked to play a discreet game of seeing how much biographical data she could glean from a new acquaintance without resorting to the crudity of direct inquiry. Now she was able to put together that Vogt had been a teacher of English at a private boys' boarding school near Boston of which he himself was a graduate, that he had already spent two years on submarines in both the Atlantic and the Pacific, that his parents had a summer cottage in Bar Harbor, Maine (from which she deduced that they were well-to-do and could afford to let him be an instructor if he insisted), and that he had been unhappily married and divorced but had no children. He was intensely male and intensely conscious of her. Yet he gave her an odd sense of absolute security. Her mind, full of a romanticism that she scorned, was already dubbing him Bayard, sans peur et sans reproche.
She was pleased but hardly surprised when, the conversation turning to books, he told them that the war had not interfered with his reading but rather intensified it.
"No matter how much there is to do on shipboard," he said, "there is still time to read. Long periods in port for repairs and so forth. You can't work all the time, even when you're on duty, and when you're not working there's often nothing else to do. We were in Attu, for example, for two whole months. My mother can never understand why in her letters I'm so interested in even the trivial events of her life at home. She imagines that people involved in a big war must be taken up with big things. She can't understand that the twenty minutes in my bunk when I'm reading Henry James's The Spoils of Poynton is the high point of my day."
"I can't say that I rise as high as that," was Linda's comment. "But I readily admit that Trollope has got me through some rough times in the Canal Zone."
"Well, of course, I'm fortunate in having the daily drama at the embassy before me," Stuart put in with his customary condescension. "Keeping an eye on the devilish international intrigues of Latin America provides a shelf of whodunits for me. Some may think we're a remote post in this war, but the German agents are everywhere."
Conrad had a jeep at his service and took Linda back to her hotel after dropping Stuart off.
"War was made for the Stuart Frasers of this world," he told her, but in a tone devoid of spite. "They can enjoy every minute of it, and when it's over and we've won, can't you see His Excellency Ambassador Fraser telling off one minor Latin dictator after another? Oh, Stuart will always be magnificent. Some men have to develop an air of greatness to go with their achieved importance. Stuart will develop greatness to go with his already achieved air of it."
"I didn't imagine you were the best of friends."
"Oh, don't get me wrong. I'm very fond of Stuart. He's a friend from boyhood, and we always have special tolerances for such. Besides, he's basically well-meaning. But I like to take him in small doses. Not the way I like to take you, Mrs. Griswold."
"Linda, please."
"Unlike you, Linda. May I see you again? For dinner? I know you're married, and I'm sure happily married. I wouldn't be such a silly ass as to think I could cause even a ripple on that. But just a friendly dinner?"
"You're not married, I take it."
"No, my wife, like Henry VIII in Shakespeare's last play, found 'metal more attractive.'"
"She had little taste, then. Of course I'll have dinner with you."
"Not just to keep the navy happy?"
"Well, that too."
In the following fortnight they dined together four times, always in the same little restaurant chosen by him. They avoided the Union Club and Stuart Fraser; nor did they see fit to tell him of their meetings. The embassy secretary had ceased to exist for them. The bond they shared was a past, a past of blessed things that, brought up in lively but nostalgic discussions, seemed to illuminate a dreary war-torn world. It was not, for either of them, so much the past that had immediately preceded Armageddon; it was rather the past of chil
dhood and the loss of innocence, which now seemed almost the loss of everything. Linda's husband, for example, despite her long acquaintance with him, figured as a near stranger to her reminiscences; it was as if this beautiful and pensive and mildly melancholy submarine lieutenant had been the sole companion of those days of yore.
"My wife used to say I was Peter Pan," he confessed. "And she didn't mean it kindly, either. She hated my being a schoolteacher. She had taken for granted when we were married that I would eventually have a job in my father's brokerage house. But when I got that sudden offer to teach at Saint Jude's and jumped at it, she accused me of crawling back into the nursery. Perhaps I was."
"And she hated Saint Jude's?"
"Hated isn't strong enough. She didn't last there a year. She bolted and shed me and married an old beau of hers who had gone into Daddy's firm. And I have to be fair to her. The happiest days of mine were my schooldays at Saint Jude's. It was there I met Shelley and Keats and, of course, Shakespeare. I loved the friends and the sports and the lovely green campus and the tower of the Gothic chapel. Oh, I was like that poem of Matthew Arnold's, 'Rugby Chapel'! I even had a religious phase."
"How I see it!" she exclaimed. "I was that way at Saint Timothy's. The springtime of life! We should have known it couldn't last. Maybe you did know. For you'll never be a poet, Conrad. An unhappy childhood is an essential preliminary to great art."
The Young Apollo and Other Stories Page 9
