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.
As time passed, it became increasingly difficult for Mr. Sheer to regard his life as an imposture. He still believed that he could “be himself with me, but actually our conversations were more and more taken up with politics, the weather, the women’s dresses, the state of business, till the outlaw Mr. Sheer I dined with was practically indistinguishable from the Mr. Sheer one met at the gallery or at a hunt breakfast somewhere in New Jersey. It was plain, at last, that Mr. Sheer had not imposed on the business world and used it for his own delight, but that the business world had used Mr. Sheer, rejecting the useless or outmoded parts of him. He had not, as he first thought, outwitted anybody, but he had somehow, imperceptibly, been outwitted himself.
Yet masquerade was life to Mr. Sheer. He could not bear to succeed in his own personality, any more than an unattractive woman can bear to be loved for herself. So he began, indirectly, unwittingly, to try to fail. It was distressing to watch him, for even here he was conforming to the conventions of the businessman’s world. This Mr. Sheer who had once hunted danger, joyously, down a hundred strange byways, was now walking glumly down a well-trodden road into the jaws of a respectable ruin.
He had a love affair with his best client’s wife, and he played the stock market. Both of these ventures he pursued with a terrible listlessness. He could hardly bother to follow his stocks in the newspaper, or to telephone the lady for whom he was risking so much. It was only when his broker sold him out, and when he brought the lady home to her husband with her evening dress wrong-side-out, that his spirits revived, and he would dwell on the two misfortunes with his old rueful delight.
The Hermitage Galleries, however, saw him through, and the client, who had been looking for a pretext to break with his wife, readily forgave him. Mr. Sheer grew more despondent than ever, and his health began to worry him. He had a masseur in the morning, and he went to a gymnasium in the evening; he subjected himself to basal-metabolism tests, urinalyses, blood counts, took tonics to pep him up and bromides to quiet him and was still, unaccountably, tired. Last year they took out his appendix and his teeth; when he recovered, he had not lost that daily, dragging fatigue, but only acquired an appetite for the knife.
I saw him off to the hospital recently to have his gall bladder removed.
“It’s a very dangerous operation, Margaret; it may be the death of me,” he said.
And for the first time in many weeks he giggled irrepressibly.
*An extract from memoirs begun by the heroine.
THREE
The Man in the Brooks Brothers Shirt
THE NEW MAN WHO came into the club car was coatless. He was dressed in gray trousers and a green shirt of expensive material that had what seemed to be the figure “2” embroidered in darker green on the sleeve. His tie matched the green of the monogram, and his face, which emerged rather sharply from this tasteful symphony in cool colors, was blush pink. The greater part of his head appeared to be pink, also, though actually toward the back there was a good deal of closely cropped pale-gray hair that harmonized with his trousers. He looked, she decided, like a middle-aged baby, like a young pig, like something in a seed catalogue. In any case, he was plainly Out of the Question, and the hope that had sprung up, as for some reason it always did, with the sound of a new step soft on the flowered Pullman carpet, died a new death. Already the trip was half over. They were now several hours out of Omaha; nearly all the Chicago passengers had put in an appearance; and still there was no one, no one at all. She must not mind, she told herself; the trip West was of no importance; yet she felt a curious, shamefaced disappointment, as if she had given a party and no guests had come.
She turned again to the lady on her left, her vis
-à-vis at breakfast, a person with dangling earrings, a cigarette holder, and a lorgnette, who was somebody in the New Deal and carried about with her a typewritten report of the hearings of some committee which she was anxious to discuss. The man in the green shirt crowded himself into a love seat directly opposite, next to a young man with glasses and loud socks who was reading Vincent Sheean’s Personal History. Sustaining her end of a well-bred, well-informed, liberal conversation, she had an air of perfect absorption and earnestness, yet she became aware, without ever turning her head, that the man across the way had decided to pick her up. Full of contempt for the man, for his coatlessness, for his color scheme, for his susceptibility, for his presumption, she nevertheless allowed her voice to rise a little in response to him. The man countered by turning to his neighbor and saying something excessively audible about Vincent Sheean. The four voices, answering each other, began to give an antiphonal effect, Vincent Sheean was a fine fellow, she heard him pronounce; he could vouch for it, he knew him personally. The bait was crude, she reflected. She would have preferred the artificial fly to the angleworm, but still…. After all, he might have done worse; judged by eternal standards, Sheean might not be much, but in the cultural atmosphere of the Pullman car, Sheean was a titan. Moreover, if one judged the man by his intention, one could not fail to be touched. He was doing his best to please her. He had guessed from her conversation that she was an intellectual, and was placing the name of Sheean as a humble offering at her feet. And the simple vulgarity of the offering somehow enhanced its value; it was like one of those home-made cakes with Paris-green icing that she used to receive on her birthday from her colored maid.
The Company She Keeps Page 6
