Harmony In Flesh and Black

by Nicholas Kilmer

  But Whistler liked in his finished paintings to brag, Anyone else, to accomplish all I have done, would have been obliged to invest five times as much paint. The picture of La Belle Conchita, by contrast, had been done with delicious abandon, luxuriance, almost profligacy, in the use of material.

  Still, it made a tempting story to go beside the one about Whistler’s mistress Jo, whom Whistler, in a gesture of fraternal comradeship, had delivered over to Courbet as a model. Also, Fred loved the title Harmony in Flesh and Black, so nearly right for a Whistler.

  But no, it wouldn’t work with Whistler as the painter. The props were right, but not the manner. Fred had come to the end of the alphabet. He looked at his watch. He had been over two hours. The young lady with the interest in pottery was still sleeping soundly. The little fellow with the bow tie had disappeared.

  Who, during the time in question, the 1880s, was exhibiting nudes that looked like the one Clayton had bought?

  That question took Fred to the illustrated catalogs of Salon exhibitions.

  * * *

  Fred called Clayton from the pay phone upstairs. Clay was on the point of leaving for Doolan’s, intending to collect Albert Finn on the way.

  “Amusing,” Clay said, “to think how we will tiptoe past each other, conversing and exchanging wisdom while I attempt to look at the Heade without showing interest and he tries not to be noticed noticing my pointed lack of interest.

  “Then there’s the Gardner. Finn must be watched there. You don’t think you and Molly could do me a tremendous favor and come after all? Your lady Molly can get anything she wants out of anybody, so we could aim her at Albert Finn.”

  Fred told Clay to forget it.

  “I suppose there are limits,” Clay said.

  * * *

  Fred left the library and walked past Turbridge Street, along Harvard, looking down at its usual quiet.

  Not reporting the ugly fact of Smykal’s murdered body had been a crime. But reporting the thing on the floor was not going to make Smykal any less dead. Fred could go in again now, have a more careful look, and then report the body—take some initiative to shake things loose.

  But no. Turbridge Street was a trap, nothing to mess with. He’d let that work according to its own logic. It took discipline to put the scent of murder, and its retinal impact, firmly enough to the side to determine the best course to follow. He had a life to lead with Molly and her children, and he would give a great deal to keep it free from the random, searching stain of death by violence.

  * * *

  Fred drove back to Arlington. Some of Saturday was left. Despite the pitfall waiting on Turbridge Street, the afternoon had cleared enough for baseball. Fred caught Terry as she was leaving for her Little League game. She looked pretty, with her thin brown hair matted and raspberry jam on the shirt of her orange uniform. On the days when she worked, Molly had to rely on the kids to fend for themselves and remember what their appointments were.

  “Wait a minute. Put your bike away, and I’ll go with you,” Fred said.

  An afternoon of idyllic, nonessential conflict would be a good thing. He could watch Terry pitch—she was really quite good—and at the same time be well away from anywhere he was expected. They put Terry’s bike in the garage, and Fred drove her to the park and sat among the moms and dads watching the game get started.

  Fred would lie low this afternoon and tonight, while Clay was hobnobbing with his cohorts at the Gardner. Depending on how soon Smykal rose to the surface, he might even wait until Monday to talk with Clay again.

  Why shouldn’t Fred enjoy some aspect of a simple life? Why shouldn’t he quietly watch Terry play baseball? Afterward he would drive her home and take the family out for Chinese. Later he and Molly might see what developed.

  Sitting in the chilly sunlight, enjoying the children’s struggle with the game, Fred was amazed, almost alarmed, at what his life, at this moment, looked like. He resembled someone with a wife and kids.

  As he watched the game, he felt anger blossoming that he knew had been seeded as soon as he looked down on that sordid, murdered thing on Turbridge Street. It had no right to spoil his chances. It had no right to threaten to cast its cloud—Fred’s cloud—over the little family where he was finding a civilian purpose.

  He wouldn’t stand for it. And why should Molly?

  In Molly’s company things could be funny. Unless Fred ruined it.

  That was a kind of beauty, funny. Like the children.

  Fred saw Terry’s team suffer a beautiful and ignominious defeat. He bought her an ice cream and comforted her for her skill and heroism, and they arrived home as the cold rain of evening started again. Molly met them at the door, dressed in a damp towel, moving fast.

  “You shit,” she told Fred. “You didn’t leave a message where you were. I’ve been on the phone to Clayton. You never told me he gave us tickets to the party at the Gardner. I had to stop on my way home to have my hair cut. I ordered pizza for the children. Can you pick it up while I dress? I don’t know what you’re going to wear.”

  7

  The style of the Gardner Museum was what Molly’s mother called Italianette. The building squats on Boston’s Fenway, a stucco cube embracing a covered garden courtyard that Mrs. Gardner built to segregate a segment of nature for the enjoyment of herself and her collection, including her husband, Jack. She bequeathed it in trust, to be maintained for posterity as she had left it, with nothing to be added or taken down.

  Molly and Fred were ushered in, ditched their raincoats at the door, and became beautiful.

  Molly’s routine did not normally lead her to spend time with the glitterati. She looked with interested pleasure across the ebb and flow.

  “Of course they’re only doing what they can to get into one another’s pants,” Molly observed. “Robbing each other, telling tales, backbiting, setting each other up as fools and criminals, stealing from each other, wrecking each other’s jobs and marriages, generally making hell for each other—but don’t they look lovely doing it!”

  Musicians played instruments in the courtyard: strings and reeds. It was a mob scene. Each paying guest was one of the elect. There was barely room in the corridors, staircases, exhibition rooms, and balconies for the happy few. Old Isabella’s collection was hard to see except for what was suspended above crowd level: the tapestries and Oriental screens. Isabella had led an extended rape of Europe’s churches, burdening ships with cargoes of rood screens, altarpieces, baptismal fonts, and fossilized saints. “It’s as if I’d kept Terry’s room just as she left it this morning,” Molly said. They’d gone to a third-floor room to make a first survey of the place. Above the crowd, Titian’s bull carried Europa off, the bull being headed toward them across painted water like a duck while attendants worried in the background, on the shore. Europa managed in spite of everything to keep her nightgown from riding all the way up, “maintaining a nice sense of priorities,” as Molly said.

  When Molly had met him at the kitchen door, so mad at him and so eager to go to the ball, Fred had objected. Clayton had pulled a fast one, stacking the deck by sneaking her the invitation. They’d almost had a fight, but not quite, and Molly was prepared to have a good time and be friends, if Fred would only “cheer up and be a good loser.”

  As long as Smykal’s undiscovered body festered in secret, surrounded by the trophies of his hobby—correction: his art—it was probably just as well for Fred to be visible, looking his normal self.

  “Golly, Fred,” Molly had said, driving with all deliberate speed through the dark, wet streets of Arlington. “You look better than an eight-dollar salad in your costume, and for goodness’ sake, it’s only a party.”

  Fred had angrily thrown together something resembling a camouflage outfit for jungle warfare as conceived by Bill Mauldin in 1944.

  “Remind me,” Molly said, “what they mean by their theme of the evening, ‘In the Pre-Raphaelite Mode.’”

  Fred wrenched his mind away from whe
re it was and toward the companion he had chosen. “I will instruct you, dear young lady,” he said, “if you will forgive a man for having been infected by a brief time of youth misspent among the undergraduates at Harvard, a university in the American Northeast.”

  “Lay on,” Molly said.

  Fred harrumphed and commenced. “The Pre-Raphaelites are to painting what ‘Italianette’ is to architecture. Invented in the late eighteen hundreds by exhausted English Puritans who had not given up romance, the style works like an omelet made with boiled eggs. They—William Morris, Burne-Jones, Lord Leighton, and so on—undertook to imitate the style and ideals of fifteenth-century Italian painters who were in turn imitating the style and ideals of Roman painting, which had entirely disappeared before they started imitating it but which they guessed must have looked like the Greek statues the Romans had stolen. The nineteenth-century version, of course, was improved by Christian and Victorian ideals.

  “The Pre-Raphaelites eschewed representing such common and depressing contemporary themes as coal mines, hangings, or the profession of collecting night soil, and instead chose imagined ancient scenes to elevate the spirit and demonstrate morality. The subjects are often nude except for their suppressed genitals—Burne-Jones used the airbrush long before it was invented—or they wear Roman dress, or medieval dress based on the Roman. Except for Rossetti, all of these painters depict the traditional British stiff upper lip, though other exposed parts remain flaccid. William Morris had an extraordinary thing for feet.”

  “Ah,” Molly said. “The perfect choice for a theme party in Boston. You have been most helpful, Fred.”

  Once surrounded by the party, Molly complained, “Apart from the serving wonks and wenches, the Pre-Raphaelite theme eludes me.”

  “Bostonians are shy,” Fred told her. “Unlike myself.”

  Few of the elect had chosen to come in costume, something that, at the last moment, had been Fred’s only option. Most of the men wore black tie, the more adventuresome showing a dab of color at the waist. The women wore their standard evening things, which this year looked like outfits designed, and then rejected as too silly, in the late fifties: short skirts, with large spots, checks, and bows serving no structural function.

  The Gardner’s board of trustees had wisely voted to compel youths and maidens, hired to take coats and serve champagne, to dress according to the theme. They were all young and comely. The youths wore tights and velvet doublets from a costumer; the tights and doublets were of different colors. The maidens wore diaphanous pleated tunics, some long, some quite short, in a variety of pastels.

  “You see,” Fred told Molly, “you could have been a bacchante. You would be perfect in a belted sheet.”

  She’d chosen to wear her basic black, which made her look delicious and suited her to most occasions.

  “And you could have worn my yellow Easter panty hose,” Molly countered, accepting champagne from a maiden.

  They went back down to the courtyard, lush with palms and potted blue flowers that looked to Fred like a cross between pansies and linoleum. Clayton Reed, in black tie (he was born in black tie), appeared, kissed Molly’s hand, and asked Fred more loudly than necessary, “What do you represent?”

  Having been trapped into attending the party, Fred was prepared to be belligerent concerning the costume he had cobbled together. He wore a white shirt, open at the neck, and on his head a wreath woven of ivy and spring flowers torn out of Molly’s garden. To this he had added pants, his darkest available pants.

  “I’m surprised you don’t recognize the allusion,” Fred answered. “You are familiar with John Reinhard Weguelin’s Toilet of Taunus, also known as Adoring the Herm? Oil on canvas, forty by twenty-three inches, signed and dated 1887, in which a young bacchante is crowning, with a wreath, the herm of Bacchus? Offered at Sotheby’s in New York on May 24, 1988? You don’t remember? Lot ninety-six. I’m being the herm.”

  “That explains the wreath,” Clay muttered. “The John Reinhard Weguelin allusion eludes me. Is it necessary?”

  “You can check with the John Reinhard Weguelin guy,” Fred said. “That’s Vern G. Swanson of Springville, Utah, director of the Museum of Art there. It’s probably necessary at least to Vern.”

  “I understand, Fred. This is blather. You are joking, yes? Meanwhile, Finn’s here,” Clay said grimly. He pointed upward. “I saw him presiding over that balcony, from which he may yet bless this multitude should the divine afflatus move him. The man’s a miracle of heated air. All afternoon I had him. And at Doolan’s—he stood for fifteen minutes with that haystack in his hands, talking about how grand he is, and how modest a thing is Heade in comparison. Dismissing it. Yes. Yes, indeed. But I saw him on that balcony. He was talking, nay, whispering, with Higginson.”

  Higginson was an intern, a temporary assistant to the world’s expert on Martin Johnson Heade. The expert himself was traveling this year, which made Higginson, in Higginson’s opinion, world expert by default pro tem.

  “Right,” Fred said. “He’d have to be. Admitted it’s a small world, but it is unfortunate that the Heade guy should be a local boy. Why couldn’t it have been he, and not Swanson, who took the job in Springville, Utah?”

  “Let me have your ear, Molly,” Clayton said, leading her toward a table groaning with little things to eat. Clayton was not over six feet, but he was so thin and graceful that he gave the appearance of being very tall. His full mane of white hair made him seem older than he was; also, he looked distinguished. In fact, Fred thought, considering the scene from under the sticky shadows of his wreath, Molly and Clay made a distinguished-looking couple.

  Fred had warned Molly, driving in, that Clayton’s motives in procuring entrance for them were not pure.

  “Poor herm. Even this party is almost like work for you, isn’t it?” She grinned.

  The main work Fred was doing consisted in his appearing within this gathering as someone totally unburdened by guilty knowledge. It was why he had chosen the wreath’s conspicuous disguise.

  Fred watched Molly disappear into the throng on Clayton’s arm. Clay was looking smooth, concerned about nothing, happily exploiting his canopy. Molly was as good as Clayton at working a crowd: affable, personable, and able to converse without ruffling feathers. These were skills Fred did not have and could not make up for with directness and candor. It was a mark of the creative working relationship between them, not to mention also of Molly’s willing versatility, that even when tricked into attending this function against his better judgment, Fred, without prior planning, could slide Molly onto Clayton’s arm and send her off to help him.

  Meanwhile, there were people whom Fred could watch and talk to and, as both he and Clay acknowledged without having to spell it out, get somewhere with, whom Clay himself would only make bristle.

  For one thing, there is a line between the collector and the dealer, though for many that line is blurred. Clay was pure collector, while Fred kept nothing. This gave Fred a fellowship with those who lived by their wits, many of whom, dealers, turned out for such occasions as tonight’s, and for the same reason Clay had dragooned Fred into attending: to see what was rustling in the underbrush. Many of the revelers were Clay’s relations by marriage. Fred had come to know some of them. Those who did not use Stillton as a last name tended to exhibit it prominently in the middle of their other names: thus if you had to be a mere Lowell, you could at least be a Something Stillton Lowell.

  Fred knew most of the players in Boston’s art scene by now. Some had become friends. The fact that business matters occasionally led to moments of confrontation over a piece of merchandise or information was seldom a serious problem, and there was even a camaraderie among some that resulted in a system of mutual aid. But none of them forgot they were in competition, and their business prospered best by being strictly guarded. In the art business you learned quickly who could be trusted and who not; whose word was good; who couldn’t tell the truth; who bragged; who manufactured se
crets; who was spiteful; who trafficked in facts and who in innuendo; who was attached to substance and who floated free. All this was important to know among people who bought and sold objects to which society attached great financial value, in a business absurdly free of regulation.

  In such a gathering as this evening’s there were people whom Fred would like to see anywhere and would enjoy talking to. Other people he’d as soon never see but might have reason to talk to. Still others he’d talk to only if he had to, such as—Fred saw him now across the courtyard, ostentatiously drinking beer from a bottle—Buddy Mangan, the current enfant terrible, wild card, and cause célèbre of the art business in these parts.

  Mangan was attending the benefit in his normal uniform: baggy Farmer Jones–style blue jeans with straps and bib, a checked work shirt, and a hanging, untied bow tie. His curly hair was blond and short, his awkward grin infectious, his laugh loud. A man in his early forties, he had begun to appear, coming from nowhere, in the auction houses of Boston and New York two years previously. He had with ruthless speed blasted a place for himself in the Boston world of art dealers—or at least in the auction end of things. Because when he set his sights on something, he normally continued bidding until he bought it, and he paid cash.

  Fred, when he spotted Buddy Mangan, was talking with Oona, who had an antique shop resembling an old-fashioned general store on Boston’s Charles Street. They felt they had a lot in common since Fred had come out of farmland in the Midwest and Oona was from Hungary. She said she was old enough to be Fred’s mother, looked as if she had been strung together from dumplings and melons, and flirted outrageously. Oona this evening had already consumed more than her share of Italianette champagne—Asti Spumante—and was so complimentary about the wreath he wore that Fred feared she was about to follow the bacchante’s example and commence to adore the herm. Oona tutted, looking crossly at Buddy Mangan.