Corpus Christmas

by Margaret Maron

  “Sigrid Harald,” she responded and handed her coat over to an attendant. “I think Oscar Nauman’s expecting me?”

  “Ah, yes.” Mrs. Beardsley led her past an ornate Christmas tree and gestured toward the arched doorway near a wide marble staircase. “There he is now.”

  Suddenly all the silly panic over her clothes and makeup seemed worth it for the look in Nauman’s eyes as he crossed the hall to her.

  “Very nice,” he said, handing her a bourbon-and-Coke. “I was afraid you might not come.”

  “Not come?” she asked. “Why would you think that?”

  Seated at the desk in his makeshift office up on the fourth floor, Roger Shambley happily fingered the pack of letters. He had read them so many times since last night that he’d virtually memorized whole passages. For the most part they chronicled the usual unexceptional adventures of an earnest young man released from schoolbooks and given permission to play for a year or two before settling into adult responsibilities.

  After graduation in the spring of 1911, young Erich Breul Jr. had spent the summer at the family’s vacation “cottage,” near Oswego on the eastern end of Lake Ontario. (Nowhere near as grand as the “cottages” at Newport, the Breuls roughed it each summer with a mere eighteen rooms and a live-in staff of only five.)

  In August he sailed to England for a month in London, then entrained for Vienna by way of Antwerp, Cologne, and Frankfurt. Christmas and most of January were passed with his mother’s people in Zurich. Spring found him in Rome. In each great art center, he dutifully visited the appropriate museums and churches, attended the expected concerts and operas, and afterwards, with filial rectitude, recorded his impressions of each for his “dear Mama and Papa” back home.

  As spring turned to summer in those letters, Shambley could read between the lines and sense young Breul’s growing saturation with the old masters, lofty music, and approved lectures in fusty rooms. June made him restless for open air and manly exercise. Accordingly, he had sent his luggage ahead to Lyons and, in company with several similarly minded youths, had hiked along the Mediterranean coast from Genoa to Marseilles.

  At Marseilles, he had somehow acquired a pet monkey, Chou-Chew. The details of that acquisition were glossed over; Shambley suspected a rowdy night in one of those waterfront taverns frequented by seamen from all over the world.

  In any event, Breul had parted from his friends, who were going on to Barcelona, purchased a bicycle, and, with the monkey in an open wicker basket on the front, had pedaled northward up the Rhone valley. He meandered through small villages where he bought bread and cheese or a night’s lodging; and as he entered the fertile plains north of Avignon, he enjoyed both the blazing sun overhead and the cool shaded avenues of plane trees that lined the irrigation canals.

  It was mid-August and the young vagabond was dawdling along a back road near the nondescript village of Sorgues-sur-l’Ouvèze when his innocent reveries were suddenly interrupted by an enormous white dog that bounded over the hedgerows, barking with such deceptive ferociousness that the startled young American promptly crashed his machine into the nearest tree.

  Enter Picasso and Braque, thought Shambley, who had spent most of the night reading everything he could put his hands on concerning their summer of 1912.

  The dog was Picasso’s, a Great Pyrenees, one of those shaggy white creatures as big as a Newfoundland or Great Dane. His whole life long, Picasso had adored animals, from exotic zoo specimens to the most common domestic cat. How could he resist a monkey?

  Braque, himself a cyclist, was more concerned about the damage done to Breul’s new bicycle.

  While Picasso quieted his dog and charmed the frightened monkey from the tree with his dark expressive eyes and coaxing voice, Braque hoisted the crumpled machine over his broad shoulder. Together, they led the youth to the nearest blacksmith’s, left the bicycle for repairs, and insisted that he go with them for a glass of wine.

  As so often happens—even with strictly reared young Lutherans—one glass of wine led to two and before long, the first bottle was empty and Picasso ordered a second in which to toast “le grand Vilbure,” that great American whom he and Braque admired above all others and whose death that spring had so impoverished the world. The Spaniard spoke French with such a heavy accent that Erich Jr. had to ask him to repeat the name twice. Even then, Picasso had to spread his arms and make engine noises before Breul understood that they were toasting Wilbur Wright.

  Eventually, the blacksmith’s apprentice tracked them down and informed M’sieu Breul that it would be three days before his bicycle could be repaired. His master had sent to Orange for the necessary part. One must be patient.

  “But I’m due in Lyons day after tomorrow!” said M’sieu Breul. “I’m to meet friends there. It’s my birthday.”

  “Tant pis,” shrugged the blacksmith’s apprentice. “Never mind,” Braque and Picasso told him. “We will celebrate your natal day here.”

  Although this would be the last summer that Picasso had to worry about money, the two artists had deliberately chosen Sorgues for two reasons: it was cheap and no one knew them there. But perhaps they missed Apollinaire, Max Jacob, Derain, Manolo, Juan Gris, Havilland, and all the other friends with whom they socialized back in Paris. Or perhaps their kindness to the young American sprang from a combination of great personal and professional happiness just then. Not only did their work intoxicate them, so did their women.

  Braque and his Marcelle still considered themselves newlyweds and Picasso had only that spring taken a new mistress, the lovely and delicate Eva, “ma jolie,” who was to die so young.

  In any event, Picasso volunteered to nursemaid Chou-Chew and Braque arranged for Breul to stay with him and his wife at Villa Bel Air, a rather dreary and commonplace house that was more beautiful in name than in fact.

  Shambley wished Erich Jr. had written less about Braque’s domestic arrangements and much more about Braque’s studio, the pictures he saw there, or the conversations that must have passed between the two artists when Picasso arrived the next morning with the monkey on his shoulder.

  Instead, after a brief reference to Braque’s trompe-l’oeil technique and how he used combs and varnishes to duplicate the appearance of marble or grained wood on his canvases, Erich Jr. wrote that he did not think dear Papa would find the work of his new friends very meaningful. “I fear that you, with your deep love and knowledge of pure art, would scorn their papier collé and the strange analytical shapes of their designs, but their experiments interest me very much and when they explain what they are doing, their excitement infuses me as well.”

  Having seen the results, Shambley could use his imagination to fill in the details Erich Jr. so lightly touched upon. They made him sit in a chair all afternoon, gave him Braque’s violin to play and, while the monkey clambered at will over sitter and artists alike, began to devise a birthday portrait, using their new techniques. In the evening Marcelle and Eva produced a special dinner and Breul gave them most of his pocket money for wine. By midnight, the portrait was declared finished (even though it had taken on certain simian details as more bottles were emptied) and both artists had signed it on the back before making a formal presentation to the birthday boy.

  In return, Erich Jr. had risen to the occasion with a speech about Spanish-French-American friendship, in token of which he now gave his bicycle to Braque and his monkey to Picasso. Early the next day, with his portrait tied up in brown paper, a slightly queasy young American—“I think it must have been the sausages,” he wrote his parents—caught the morning train to Lyons, where his wander jahr returned to its prescribed paths.

  Except that it hadn’t quite, thought Shambley, turning to the letters written after Breul settled in Paris for what was to be his final six months before sailing home. He was discreet about his sorties into bohemia, and his assurances of studious application to conventional art and culture were probably written in response to pointed questions from home. But the
catalogs and Montparnasse menus, not to mention the two Légers hanging four floors down in that zoo of a janitor’s room, gave ample evidence that the junior Breul had spent as much time among the avant-garde of Paris as in the venerable Louvre.

  Shambley returned the last letter to its envelope and blocked them between his small hands like a deck of cards. At that moment, Dr. Roger Shambley was a deeply happy man. All his life he’d chased those capricious goddesses, Fame and Fortune.

  Native intelligence and dogged hard work had made him a well-regarded expert in nineteenth-century American art. His first two books had gained him tenure; his third confirmed his reputation for good solid scholarship, which translated into speaking engagements, magazine articles, even an occasional spot on the Today Show when a feature story required an art historian’s authoritative comment. If that art historian came across the tube as acerbic and witty, all the better.

  Yet everyone dreams of immortality. No matter how competently and wittily written, few books survive their time if they only rehash previously known data; but the discoverer of new material will always be read simply because he was first. That’s why every scholar dreams of new finds—that Greek statue only a shovelful of dirt away, that major missing piece of the puzzle. Discoveries automatically turn on the grant machines and roll out appointments and promotions.

  With these letters and a description of how he found an unknown seminal work, Shambley knew he could write a monograph that would become a permanent appendage to the Picasso-Braque legend. Not only that, he would become a hero to everyone connected to the Breul House. Once it was made public that this dead-in-the-water museum contained the only documented example in the entire world of a Picasso-Braque collaboration, they’d have to put in a conveyor belt to keep the crowds moving.

  Which took care of fame.

  As for fortune…

  Those two Léger canvasses presented interesting possibilities, none of which involved the Breul House. Today, he had gone to the Museum of Modern Art and bought two Léger posters as nearly like the two on Pascal Grant’s wall in size and composition as he could manage. He had already stashed them in one of the basement storage rooms. In the next day or so, as soon as he could substitute them for the real pictures, he would announce his discovery of the Picasso-Braque collage.

  There would be such an instant uproar of excitement that even if the janitor noticed the difference between the posters and the authentic paintings, who would pay him any mind?

  No one. He’d be home free with two Légers of his very own. Too bad he couldn’t openly offer them for sale at, say, Sotheby’s. Auctions always brought the highest prices. But Sotheby’s required a legal history of the artwork it put on the block: documents, canceled checks, and bills of sale; and the only provenance he could offer would be the 1912 catalog he’d found in Erich Jr.’s effects.

  No, he’d have to find someone with a love of modern art, a streak of larceny, and the resources to indulge expensive tastes.

  He looked at his watch. Time to put in an appearance downstairs. He started to put the letters back in his briefcase, then hesitated. Maybe it would be safer to leave the letters here for now. There were a million hiding places in this cluttered attic but, as most scholars knew, a misfiled letter is a lost letter.

  Shambley opened a drawer marked “Miscellaneous Business Correspondence: 1916/1917” and craftily filed the packet under “August 1916.”

  At that moment be felt positively gleeful, as if the ghost of Christmas Present had upended an enormous bag of toys at his feet. If the attic stairs had possessed a free-standing banister, he would have slid right down it, and it was all he could do to keep from chortling aloud. He stepped into the servants’ lavatory on the third floor, smoothed his unruly hair, and put his pugnacious face into a semblance of professorial dignity.

  But as he walked downstairs to join the party, it occurred to Roger Shambley that perhaps he wouldn’t have to look very far for the buyer he needed.

  The Breul dining room was the scene of many elaborate and festive dinners. Sophie Fürst Breul’s mother was famous in Zurich for her brilliant dinner parties and her daughter brought the Fürst touch with her to New York. Although extravagant, perhaps, by our 1950’s standards, Mrs. Breul’s dinners were considered small and select in their day and the guest list never exceeded forty, the number which could be comfortably seated at her table. Like Scrooge after his conversion, it could be said that the Breuls “knew how to keep Christmas well, if any [couple] alive possessed the knowledge”; and it was their custom to invite a few friends for “supper” on Christmas night. The following is from Mrs. Breul’s menu files and was dated “Christmas 1906.”

  Créme d’asperge

  _______

  Hûtres Sardines Dinde fumée

  _______

  Rôti de boeuf

  _______

  Haricots verts Pommes

  _______

  Sacher Torte Noix glacée Topfenstrudel

  _______

  Vermouth Bourdeaux Champagne

  _____________________

  FROM WELCOME TO THE BREUL HOUSE!—AN INFORMAL

  TOUR,BY MRS. HAMILTON JOHNSTONE III, SENIOR

  DOCENT. (© 1956)

  VI

  Wednesday Night (continued)

  “SIGRID HARALD?” ASKED SØREN THORVALDSEN. “Er De dansk, frøken Harald?” “My father’s father was from Denmark,” Sigrid acknowledged, “but I’m afraid I know very few words of Danish.”

  And not much more than a few words of party talk either, she thought as she listened to a small white-haired woman quiz Thorvaldsen about the frivolous names he’d given his cruise ships.

  “I think ships deserve more stately names,” said the woman, whose own name Sigrid couldn’t remember. “Something like Empress of the Sea or Queen Margrethe.”

  “But those are for serious ships,” Thorvaldsen answered her playfully. “My ships are frivolous, Mrs. Hyman.”

  Hyman, Sigrid told herself. Hyman. Wife of David Hyman, trustee. And next to Mrs. Hyman was Mr. Herzog. Albert. Husband of Lydia Herzog, another trustee, whom she hadn’t yet met but of whom Mrs. Hyman had whispered, “Lydia was a Babcock, you know.”

  Sigrid did not know, but had dutifully placed a mental star next to Mrs. Herzog’s name and attached a Babcock in parentheses since Mrs. Hyman seemed to think it was important. It was the sort of remark that reminded Sigrid of going through reception lines with her Southern grandmother. If Mrs. Lattimore’s hierarchal memory of bloodlines and obscure degrees of kinship had ever failed her, Sigrid was unaware of it.

  “I shouldn’t have thought you’d find much profit in running Caribbean cruises out of New York,” Mr. Herzog observed.

  “Oh, you might be surprised how many people like the extra time in our casino,” Thorvaldsen said with pleasant candor.

  With a vague smile as Thorvaldsen elaborated on Caribbean fun ships, Sigrid detached herself from the group standing near the piano in the drawing room and wandered back to the gallery. So many pictures stacked on the walls like cordwood both fascinated and repelled her. As did everything else she’d seen of this house so far.

  It was too full of things. How could anyone relax in a place so visually distracting? Even tonight, with the lights lowered and candles to soften the impact, the busyness of the decor made her edgy. She tried to imagine the walls stripped of the pictures Erich Breul had collected, the furniture surfaces cleared of vases, ornaments, and other bibelots. Even so, would these ornate rooms really make an appropriate exhibition space for Nauman’s abstract pictures?

  Evidently she wasn’t the only one who wondered that, for immediately after her arrival, while still talking to Jacob Munson, whose old-world courtliness had charmed her, a tall storklike man in formal evening clothes strode into the Breul House, spotted Nauman, and immediately cried, “Oscar! What’s all this crap about a retrospective here?”

  “Behave yourself, Elliott,” laughed Francesca Leeds, swooping down
upon them, “or we shan’t let you play, shall we, Jacob?”

  The newcomer murmured appropriately as Sigrid was introduced to him, but his eyes were for Lady Francesca and Oscar Nauman. Arguably the hottest curator in town, Elliott Buntrock did not recall having met Sigrid at a Piers Leyden opening back in October. Nor did he seem to consider her someone with whom he need bother tonight.

  Which suited Sigrid. As the other four began to discuss the possibilities of an exhibit here at the Breul House, she had followed the sound of a piano into the drawing room where Mrs. Beardsley had introduced her to Thorvaldsen and some of the trustees of the Breul House.

  And now she had examined all the pictures hung one above the other on the gallery walls and, except for the Winslow Homer drawings, the only work that really captured her interest was a still life of bread and cheese. It reminded her empty stomach she’d eaten nothing since a pushcart hot dog around noon. Back at the far end of the drawing room, Thorvaldsen and the Hymans had been joined by Francesca Leeds and Jacob Munson; a young black woman entered the gallery in animated conversation with a vivacious middle-aged blond who exhibited a slight limp; and, as Sigrid crossed the great hall at the upper end, she saw Nauman and Elliott Buntrock walking slowly in her direction.

  Both men were tall and lean, but while Nauman looked fit and moved easily, the curator seemed all joints. In his formal black-and-white evening clothes, he looked like some sort of long-legged water bird, a stilt or a crane, picking his way across a shallow lake, on the alert for any passing minnows. He had neglected to check his long white evening scarf and it hung down over his jacket. Occasionally he would forget and gather both ends in a large bony hand and pull his head forward while making sweeping uncoordinated gestures with his free arm. Nauman had an expression on his face that did not bode well for whatever Elliott Buntrock was propounding.

  Sigrid prudently continued into the dining room.

  “You’re too important for this place,” said Buntrock. “A Nauman retrospective’s big business. Where’s your head on this, Oscar?”