“Three thousand one hundred and twenty-seven,” Leland said, “give or take a few.”
“That was only the first problem we had to overcome. Termites did such a job on the strainers that when you pressed on the wood it crumbled and turned to dust, and there was all that tunneling, more evidence they’d been there. It’s a miracle they didn’t eat the painting.”
“They wouldn’t dare,” Patrick said.
“Sure they would,” she said. “Termites will eat most anything they encounter. We’ve seen valuable paintings that were eaten to bits. Termites track upward from the soil munching away as they climb. In the wall of a house they devour the wood and the wallpaper and then whatever happens to be hanging on the wall. Paintings don’t stand a chance.”
“Tell them what else,” said Leland from his perch.
“Well, roaches love to eat paintings, too. Actually, they love the rabbitskin glue and wheat starch on the reverse of paintings that have been previously lined. Patrick, your dinner party the other day was nothing in the feast department compared to some of the meals I’ve seen roaches enjoy. Rodents like glue, too. People set rat traps with cheese, but they’d get more takers by pouring glue on the traps. There’s a world-famous antique store on Royal Street whose name I’d better not divulge. One morning the owner called and said he’d discovered that his most valuable painting had a huge hole in it. He couldn’t understand how this had happened. The painting was secure on the wall and hadn’t been moved in weeks, and the damage wasn’t a tear or a rip that would indicate it had fallen against anything. No, there was a jagged hole, as if it had been cut out with the serrated edge of a knife. The painting was a huge thing worth about a hundred thousand dollars. When we moved it to the studio Leland and the girls and I studied it under a loupe. You could see the teeth marks where a rat had supped on it. He’d come in from behind and eaten out a hole six inches in diameter, and the hole was in the most unpleasant of places.”
“Unpleasant?” said Patrick, in the exact moment when it occurred to him which part of the anatomy she meant. He looked down at the spot on his own person. “Thank you for that story, Rhys. Thank you ever so much. Of course I won’t be able to sleep tonight fearing a rat assault. You know those athletic cups baseball players fit into their jock straps to protect against stray balls? From here on out I sleep in one of those.”
“Sometimes I can’t get over the problems we’re asked to fix,” Rhys said. “Your Asmore is nothing in comparison. As for the termite damage, we ended up replacing the strainers with stretcher bars made of poplar. Also, we played it safe and lined the burlap with Belgian linen and consolidated the painting to prevent against future losses. By consolidate I mean we massaged the surface with a mixture of beeswax and damar resin to readhere loose paint pieces and flakes. Joe did the retouch.”
“Did you have time to make a frame for it?”
“Yes. And you’re going to love what we did. It’s really beautiful: twenty-three-and-three-quarters-karat gold leaf with a gesso ground and yellow bole. Joe gets credit for that, too. He did the water gilding. And he carved the moulding by hand, working from a design that was popular with the American Impressionists.”
“Sounds expensive,” Patrick said.
“It’s damned expensive,” Rhys answered. “But don’t think about the money yet. You’ve taken the most important step by electing to conserve something that potentially could change your life. Even more significant, you’re doing a good thing. We don’t just patch old paintings here. We give them new life. We save them so that future generations can enjoy them. I’m proud of you, Patrick.”
We followed her into another large room, the first yet without worktables. It was Rhys’s office. Along one wall shelves bent under the weight of art history books and massive tomes with titles such as The Preservation of Santos and The Structural Conservation of Panel Paintings. A pair of partners desks held computers and digital camera equipment, along with small bronze sculptures, terra-cotta forms and more whatnots than the eye could absorb in a glance. Behind the desks stood racks for paintings in various stages of restoration. Some of the paintings, I would learn later, were worth as much as fifty thousand dollars, while the value of others couldn’t buy you a corn dog for lunch. Antique vitrines held Rhys’s pottery collection, one devoted to rare Van Briggle pieces, a second to vintage Shearwater, a third to creations by contemporary New Orleans potters such as JoAnn Green-berg and Charles Bohn.
There was much to see, and to take it all in one had to dodge a brass display easel standing in the middle of the floor bathed in light from a pair of strategically positioned photoflood lamps. A bedsheet, appropriately splattered with a rainbow of paints, covered the rectangular object on the stand.
“I’m being unusually dramatic today,” Rhys said, “but the occasion calls for it. When will I have the opportunity to unveil an Asmore again? Patrick, say hello to your Aunt Dottie. Or Beloved Dorothy, as Levette Asmore called her.”
The sheet came off and there it was suddenly, so different from the thing we’d seen on the floor at Patrick’s house. The portrait showed a young woman in a simple white dress holding a small book and a clutch of purple irises. Her brown hair was pulled back and held by a ribbon, and her eyes radiated a dark shade of blue that was nearly cobalt. It occurred to me that they were just like Patrick’s eyes. In the background Asmore had provided a Louisiana landscape with oak trees clotting the horizon and a red wash of sun reflecting off a winding river. But it was the subject of the painting that made the strongest impression. Dorothy Marion was so exquisitely beautiful that I felt an ache of sadness recalling Patrick’s story about how she had survived to be an old maid chasing garage-sale finds.
How does it happen? I wondered. We are young without a notion of how we’ll end up, stupid to the truth of what will come. Had someone told this girl she was destined to live her life alone in a dusty house full of cats she would have laughed herself silly.
Patrick’s hand went up. He reached to touch the painting.
“Better not,” Rhys said. “The varnish needs more time to dry.” She pointed to the upper-left corner. “Asmore’s signature is there, clearly visible. Leland and I screamed when it turned up during the cleaning.”
Both Patrick and I stepped closer, squinting to see it. Just beneath the name, Asmore had added the words “Beloved Dorothy,” and the date, “December 28, 1940.”
You poor bastard, I thought. Dead in less than a year.
“It’s very difficult for me to believe,” said Patrick. “I mean, Aunt Dottie? I knew this woman. She would sit at her kitchen table with her wig on backward, like how kids wear baseball caps. There’d be cats eating scraps from the dinner plates stacked in the sink. When she’d start on the old days I’d roll my eyes. She never even mentioned this Asmore character, but obviously they were a couple once. You look at this and it’s undeniable. She looks as if… okay, to put it bluntly, she looks as if he’s just had his way with her. They’ve made love, haven’t they?”
“Have either of you noticed the river in the painting’s background?” Rhys said. “When that came up during the cleaning, Leland and I screamed a second time. You can’t overstate how significant that is to the value of this painting. It portends Asmore’s terrible destiny. It also echoes an experience of his childhood: his parents drowned in the great flood of ’27, when Levette was just a boy. Patrick, I might have to ratchet my estimate upward another twenty thousand.”
“Really? Another twenty thousand?”
“They’re going to fight for this one,” she said. “The museums, the collectors, the dealers. There’s going to be a brawl on the auction house floor.”
His face was wet with tears. I might’ve offered warm words of congratulations, but I found that I, too, was on the verge of sobbing.
TWO
At least once a week I made a point of driving Uptown and visiting my mother. She still lived in the house where I grew up, over on Hampson Street near where Sain
t Charles Avenue, following the path of the Mississippi River, makes a hard turn and becomes South Carrollton Avenue. More than a hundred years old, the house is a big, wood-frame thing that stands behind a broken wood fence and a yard crowded with too many trees. It’s the kind of place people tend to feel sorry for, a feeling that only deepened when they learned that its only occupant, a widow three months out, still wept each day at the reality of life without her husband.
Mom had plenty of friends, and she had her church, but I was her only child. I took care of the yard work, brought her car in for servicing, changed out the air-conditioning filters. Every Sunday I drove her across Lake Pontchartrain; she liked the water and the smell of the air. Other days we cooked supper together in her little kitchen, and ate on trays in front of the TV. My visits cheered her up, and I always left feeling as though I’d accomplished something. Besides the help, I’d given her what she needed most, that being family.
It was Tuesday night and trash collection came in the morning, so I dragged her cans out to the curb for pickup. Next I helped her rearrange the furniture in the living room. She wanted her favorite chair situated closer to the bay window in front so she could read her paper by the morning light, rather than by the floor lamp she had me place in a guest bedroom. “I don’t like the paper as much without you in it,” she said.
“It’s not any good anymore, is it?”
“No, it’s not, Jack.”
“I was the only writer there who could write. There isn’t a good writer left.”
“That’s what I said when I called and threatened to cancel my subscription unless they hired you back.”
“They really should hire me back. Pay me a lot more money.”
“You said you wouldn’t go back for any amount of money.”
“Then I guess it’s their loss, isn’t it?”
“You’re a young man, Jack. I don’t understand you. Your father and I did not bring you up to be this way. You need a life, something to do with yourself.”
“I have plenty to do with myself.”
“Oh, do you? What?”
“Whatever I feel like,” I said. “It keeps me hopping.”
And so went another day at Mother’s. We drove over to Foodies on the avenue and bought takeout and ate directly from the paper cartons while watching reports about Tom Cruise’s latest love interest on Entertainment Tonight. Dad had kept one of his Drysdales behind the TV, and my eyes traveled from the screen to the shadow of a rectangle that still remained on the wallpaper. I glanced around the room and counted half a dozen other places where his beloved Drysdales had hung, each of them a shade lighter than the wall surrounding it. I could’ve become awfully depressed had I let myself, but now we were learning about the rash of pregnancies among Hollywood starlets, and my mother was saying, “Oh, how fascinating,” and I understood that I had no reason to despair. If everything wasn’t right with the world at least it was the same as it had been the day before, and as it would be tomorrow.
I waited until a commercial came on before I told her about Patrick’s Asmore. “Your father would be so jealous,” she said. “And to think of all the times we pulled into the parking lot at the Salvation Army and he said, ‘Today we find one.’ And you say your friend had never heard of him?”
“He never had.”
“Why couldn’t your father have discovered one?”
“I’ve wondered that myself and I’ve come up with an answer. Dad never found one because we would have lost him earlier than we did.”
“I don’t think that’s it at all. How ridiculous.”
“It kept him alive, Mom, kept him searching. Without the Asmore to dream about the cancer would’ve taken him much sooner than it did.”
“I’d rather think he fought so hard because he didn’t want to leave you and me behind.” She settled in deeper in her chair. “Jack, the man liked paintings but they were only things. He didn’t take any with him, did he?”
She was sad most of the time but she still had a way of making sense. I brought our cartons to the kitchen and folded the trays and put them away. When I returned to the living room I sprawled out on the sofa and closed my eyes and shut out the TV. He had wanted me to be an artist and enrolled me in a drawing class, but I’d shown not a whit of talent and he’d grudgingly let me drop it. One didn’t have to understand how a picture was made to appreciate it, he said, almost as an apology to the world for producing a son so devoid of creative talent. Dad had the good sense to marry right: he not only loved his wife but he loved a woman who inherited a big house and enough money to let him have a go at being an art photographer. He followed in the tradition of N. M. Swinney, C. Bennette Moore and Eugene Delcroix, shooters from the first half of the century whose romantic images of the Vieux Carré made for popular souvenirs. Dad never hung any of his own pictures in our home, and he was always embarrassed when he found them among the offerings at weekend garage sales. One usually could be had for ten cents or a quarter, framed. The hardest I ever heard him laugh was when he found one marked for a dollar. It also was the only time I ever knew him to buy one of his pictures, but then he threw it away before we got home, stopping by a can in Audubon Park. “Don’t tell your mother,” he said, a warning I had to listen to almost every day of my childhood.
“Don’t tell her you paid a dollar for something and then put it in the trash?”
“No. Don’t tell her your father is such a failure he’s turning up at yard sales.”
I opened my eyes and she was still watching TV. She didn’t look at me, but she somehow knew I was awake again. “Do you remember the day… God, when was it?”
“When was what?”
“When your father drove us across the bridge trying to decide on the spot where Levette had gone to jump. Do you remember that?”
“Sure do. I was in the backseat, scared to death. That was a traumatic thing for a young kid. I thought Dad was going to stop and jump from the span himself.”
“It wasn’t traumatic, Jack. It was educational. You learned that there’s nothing wrong with being sensitive and loving beauty.”
“I’m glad one of us remembers what I learned.”
To show that she was enjoying my silliness, she tossed a copy of Reader’s Digest at me. “You didn’t cry when you first saw your friend’s Asmore, did you?”
“No, I didn’t. I was being very brave.”
“The only reason your father cried in front of great paintings was because he felt more than other people do.”
“I’ll give him that,” I said.
I got up and kissed the side of her face. The tears had started to fall again, but I pretended they weren’t there as I headed for the door. “Call if you need anything, Mom.”
The Williams Research Center stands on Chartres Street adjacent to K-Paul’s Louisiana Kitchen in the heart of the French Quarter. It houses the bulk of the Historic New Orleans Collection’s curatorial archives, including photographs, microfilm and clip files for artists, writers, architects and others who contributed to the city’s history and culture. Today the doors to the old Beaux Arts structure were locked, so I rang a bell for admittance. Several minutes passed before a receptionist buzzed me inside. Without once looking at me, she instructed me to fill out a form stating the purpose of my visit. “Asmore,” I wrote, and left it at that.
I climbed a broad flight of stairs to the second-floor reading room. It was a cool, vast space with a high glass ceiling and shelves crowded with books bordering the dozen or so cherry tables occupying the center of the floor. Each table came equipped with writing pads and cups holding pencils. On one end of the room there was a wall of enormous multipaneled windows looking out on the old district, on the other a desk staffed by a research assistant. “I’d like to see any materials you have on the artist Levette Asmore, please,” I said to the woman.
When she hesitated before responding, I wondered if I’d said something wrong. I nearly sniffed the body of my sweatshirt to make sure i
t was clean. She allowed a smile, but not after first giving me a look over her reading glasses. “Did you say Asmore?”
“Yes, ma’am. The artist.” Then for some odd reason I added, “The one who jumped from the Huey P.”
“Is today his birthday?” she asked. “Or perhaps the day he died?”
Even as I tried to stare it away, she would not quit with the condescending smile. “I don’t know much about him,” I answered. “That’s why I’m here.”
“I haven’t pulled the Asmore file in months and already you’re the second person this morning who’s asked for it.”
I wheeled around and immediately spotted her. She was sitting alone at the opposite end of the room, photographs and news clippings and other ephemera spread out on the desk in front of her. “Thank you,” I said to the librarian.
Head lowered in a pose of intense concentration, Rhys apparently hadn’t noticed me either. I pulled back a chair and sat across from her. “Mind if I join you?” I said, and leaned forward on my elbows.
She still seemed loath to acknowledge me. She glanced up, then hurriedly scribbled on one of the writing pads, “Jack, are you following me?”
“God, no,” I replied, my voice loud enough to lift heads in the room.
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