"You cannot simply run at them with your lance. You need a stratagem, or they'll toss you."
Henry lowered his head to avoid eye contact. “If I am unworthy of the role of Don Quixote, then let me be his dog."
Albert dismissed this conjecture after a long sip off the top of his glass of ale.
"He had a horse, Rocinante, not a dog."
Henry tried not to smile. “Rocinante! Yes. But I am satisfied to be his dog."
Albert added, “And a squire."
Henry had to look away toward the street to answer. “Yes, Sancho. And Sancho Panza had an ass by the name of Dapple. But I will play the dog."
Predictably, Albert persisted. “I don't remember a dog."
Henry said, “His name was Flip."
Albert sat back on his stool and raised an eyebrow. “I don't remember that."
Henry shrugged, then asked, “You don't remember his turning somersaults in the air to entertain Dulcinea?"
Leaning forward now on his forearms, Albert cracked a smile and spoke into the hollow of his glass before taking another swallow. “No, but where did that get him?"
Henry said, “Doing somersaults for a woman will get you nowhere. Thus the expression, ‘Don't be flip.’”
Albert grunted and then began again with his previous thought. “I wasn't being flip. I was only making the point that you can't play Don Quixote. These are real people, and there is a murderer among them. There are no windmills to battle. Besides, they burn coal now instead, so we'll have something good to breathe after they've outlawed cigarette smoke. Life is just a series of small indignities which we overcome by feigning ignorance and the government reinforces by passing laws."
Henry said, “Like being overrun by a herd of pigs."
Albert paused in an effort of patience.
"Something like that. And more importantly, there is no Dulcinea."
"There's Alice."
"She's no Dulcinea."
Henry said, “Squint a little."
Henry had opened the gate. Albert took a breath. “Squinting is not the answer. I want to sally forth and do battle. I want to build my own home without permission from the zoning board. I want to plant my garden with flowers and trade a dozen roses for a dozen eggs. But we've replaced tradition with law. Traded our prudence for jurisprudence. And we've replaced simple prejudice with hate. We homogenize and pasteurize, and the milk that used to keep for a week is now bad in three days, and it doesn't taste as good even when it's just bought. I remember sweat. Remember sweat? It was the smell of people who worked hard and bathed every day. Now the only time you smell sweat it's on some poor homeless idiot who should be taken care of, but we've tossed him out on the street to protect his civil right to freeze to death. Heroes used to unhitch the plow, kiss their wives and babies good-bye, and march off to protect their country. Now they use the word for just anybody that does the job they were paid to do. If it breaks, don't bother fixing it, just throw it away. Everything is disposable, including honor."
Henry said, “You're ranting."
Albert raised both hands in the air. “I'm trying to tell you, everything is trash now. There is nothing worth keeping."
Henry objected, “That's not like you. You're the guy with the positive mental attitude. How many times have you lectured me on the meaning of trash? Trash is good. Trash is the simple waste of living. If you don't have trash, then you don't have choices. No mistakes, no risk. No shit, no life. So what's wrong?"
Albert filled his lungs. “What's right? I put in for an adjustment on the increase in my real-estate tax last spring. Well, a guy finally came out and looked at the house a couple of months ago, and now, instead of adjusting it down, they've gone and raised it some more. So now, that two thousand dollars I paid Junior and his friend to paint the house over the summer is going to cost me another fifteen hundred a year. And Junior just lost his weekend job because he told his boss she was full of shit. I asked him if he actually used the word ‘shit.’ He did. I asked him where he learned to talk like that. He said it was from me. Meanwhile, Alice wants to go on a diet. You know what that means. It means we are all going to have to go on a diet. I told her I liked her the way she was. I been sleeping on the couch since I opened my fat mouth. And Junior has discovered girls, big-time, and they've discovered him. His report card says he's missed a dozen homework assignments in one semester. So my neighbor has filed a petition to keep me from parking my truck in my own driveway. Naturally, I parked it at the curb in front of his house, instead. He knows I go to bed early, so lately he's been turning up the music later at night. He listens to hip-hop. Alice blames me for that, too. There's no heat in the house. The boiler's got a crack in it. The damn thing is only eighty-five years old. I thought things were supposed to be made better back then. Now the guy from the oil company has refused to fix it. Says if I want his service that I've got to buy a new one. Need I continue?"
Some things just broke, Henry figured, but it wasn't worth saying. It did, however, bring up a thought which had not left his mind since it happened.
"My father said something the other day. It was about our stove. I had to ask him—I don't know why; it just occurred again to me out of the blue—I asked him, being that he's an electrician, why he had never fixed the light in the stove. You know Mom was always bending over with a flashlight to see how the pot roast was coming along. He said it was because General Electric was supposed to do it. It was covered under the warranty. So I said the warranty had probably run out forty years ago, and he said he knew that, but now he never used it anyway. They should have fixed it then, like they promised."
Albert did not catch Henry's drift. “That's just like Alice.... You can't promise Alice anything unless you mean to do it. I promised her to get the leaves out of the gutters last week. She has barely talked to me since. We ate takeout three times this week. Then Junior got tired of takeout, and he went and cleaned the gutters himself. But Alice isn't satisfied, because I broke my word. A promise is a vow. Good Lord, she has no mercy."
Henry said, “A vow is a promise."
Albert waved. “You aren't married. You just don't know."
"And promises should never be broken. Not by old Don Quixote. And not by ...” Henry paused with the thought. “It's a matter of honor. A knight's honor."
[Back to Table of Contents]
Chapter Twenty-Three
He remembered very well the first time his mother had taken him to the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. It was the winter after he had turned nine, and he had loudly objected that he had better things to do. He could not remember now what those things were.
His complaints had turned to pouting and obstinacy. Walking with her from the house, he remained five or ten feet behind. He had taken to refusing to hold her hand, having grown too big for that. But he had always liked the feel of her hand on his. It was his loss forever now.
The outside of the museum building did not impress him—a boxy structure within a black iron fence. There were no fountains, or stone lions, or even flags. Years would pass before he understood that only the treasure inside mattered. He had moaned out loud after they entered, making an ugly echo in the inner courtyard. The tempered light beneath the high glass which enclosed the courtyard intrigued him. He moaned again to hear the change in his voice. He had smuggled a toy in his pocket, a small racing car, and wanted to hold on to it when they checked their coats. For one of the few times he could recall, his mother had lost her patience and told him to stay there, in the exit hall, and wait for her beside a sad figure in a suit of armor. He had folded his own arms in defiance.
There was a door there, across from the coat room. He thought of it often as he passed it afterward. It was plain by comparison to so many of the great and wonderful doors which had been salvaged by “Mrs. Jack,” as they called her. She had brought the doors from castles and palaces across Europe to Boston and preserved them throughout the museum. However, that door just happened to be the one th
rough which Henry passed from his childhood into the difficult years of his youth.
In later times he would often walk up and down the long gallery on the third floor—that high and narrow space of letters and books, paintings, busts, gilded chairs, and the dark menace of wooden church stalls, all of which ended at the salvaged altar of a medieval chapel and the firework of stained glass illuminated by sunlight—as if it were his personal arcade.
How many hours had he watched the still figures of the tapestry there as if waiting for them to move—knights in armor astride their horses, the hounds just ahead, and maids in their funny caps and bright gowns left behind at the castle wall.
But that very first day he had wandered no further than that one small room at the bottom—the Blue Room, they called it—not at all impressive with its poor light and low ceiling. This, Henry came to realize, was the best room of all; an afterthought, crammed with its marvels like the accidental accumulation of a basement. It was a perfect room for the boy he had been and tried now to remember.
There, set high against the wall and at least as large as he was then, another boy stood, forlorn: “The Standard Bearer of the Harvest Festival,” forgotten in his task, upholding a staff of tattered flowers and wheat, dressed in the heavy cloth of an uncomfortable costume. Henry immediately knew that boy very well, and knew his thoughts. And below the boy's sandaled feet, beneath the ornate frame with the name of the artist Antonio Mancini, the dark wood of a glass-fronted bookcase secured the space—this not quite as high then as Henry's chest.
A mixed assortment of books, some upright, others on their sides, a casual presentation, intrigued him. He would have quickly pulled a volume out had the case not been locked to prevent this.
Who was this Henry Adams? What kind of “education” did he get? Henry strained to see the darkened titles through the glare of the glass. There was a name he knew: Omar Khayyam, with gilt decoration on the spine. And another: a plain brown Nathaniel Hawthorne. His mother had read some of the Tanglewood Tales to him once, but he had fallen asleep. These books were in the case at home as well—no, not these books: cheaper editions.
Who was Okakura Kakuzo? Was Claudius a name or a place, or perhaps a Latin word for the weather?
He asked the guard. The guard looked at him as the troublesome child he was and did not answer. Henry sat on the polished wood of the floor in response—not unlike the floor in the parlor at home—directly in front of the case of books and read each title, in order, occasionally looking up again at the eyes of the unhappy standard-bearer above, who must be very tired by now from holding that cumbersome staff. Henry imagined that the boy's legs might ache. His fingers would itch where they grasped the bulky decorations bound to the wood of the pole. The boy could switch hands, of course, but in his other hand he held a dark fabric bag—perhaps his regular clothes, which he longed to put on instead of those he wore.
Henry lost his count of the books then, with the thought of what the boy's bag contained, and he stood instead to wander the room. The guard moved with him, a shadow at his left eye, and Henry refused to acknowledge the presence in return for the man's rudeness.
The people in the paintings were, most of them, unhappy, or just sad. Perhaps from waiting. There was a camp in the woods, the white billow of canvas wrapped on Aspen poles. That seemed a happy place, but abandoned. A woman sat on an omnibus, dressed for a day on the town—or coming home perhaps, a shard of sun on her cheek. She seemed distressed. Another woman stood in flowing white robes over a pot of incense, her veil held out to catch the smoke. Was this self-punishment? The incense Henry knew from the holy days at St. Mary's made him choke.
A sour priest looked over the room from above the door; another woman with white hands and white face seemed buried in the black of mourning clothes. Nearby, a young woman in a white dressing gown brushed the wild fall of her red hair—in privacy perhaps ... Wasn't that the same picture he had imagined when Peter had spoken of his eccentric mother? And wasn't the reason he remembered it so well, that he had once watched at home as Miss Williams, the student boarder across the hall, had combed her hair like that—her door drawn open by the summer air from the window when he had closed his own. She had been naked. The first naked woman he had ever seen from head to foot. She brushed methodically, in quick strokes, eyes closed, her breasts bouncing as the bristles pulled free at the ends. Her unraveled hair, which he had thought was black, as it was usually tied in a tight bun on her head, had transformed in the light of the window and against her pale skin, and he saw that it was really a very dark red, as was the short red nest of hair between her thighs. She had opened her eyes just then, had seen him, and with a smile, had closed the door again. This had stirred him at the time, only months before his visit to the museum, in new ways, and stirred him now with the memory.
The guard had cleared his throat for attention. Henry moved on around the room. In another frame, a woman in a dark dress holding an umbrella for shelter made her way on a snowy street in old New York. It was a small picture by Childe Hassam, and Henry remembered standing in the spot and imagining the moment in the picture long enough for the guard to again be worried.
A phone rang. Henry started.
Below the half-size reproduction of the Standard Bearer on the wall, a light flashed in a small panel above a neat desk. The secretary returned from wherever she had gone at least ten minutes before and answered the phone, speaking while looking critically at Henry where he sat on the couch. She seemed especially unhappy with his jeans. He had worn them a few days longer than he should to avoid doing his laundry. He returned her glance by developing an opinion of her legs, which were bare from above her knee, where the pleats of her gray wool dress stopped short. He could not be so critical of what he saw. He settled on the possibility that she worked out regularly in a gym.
She hung up the phone and turned and then turned again. “It could be a while longer. He's still on the phone with a client."
Henry's eyes went to the buttons on the panel by the phone. None were lit. Her eyes followed his, and then she turned her back and disappeared down the hall.
There were other pictures from the Blue Room which had stayed with him since that first visit. There was a picture of a young man with a bandage on his head by Denman Ross. Henry had always associated it with Ernest Hemingway. Somewhere he had seen a picture of Hemingway bandaged, and even though the author and the subject of the picture were physically different, it was the fellow in the picture who had filled the role of Hemingway's hero in Henry's mind when he had read A Farewell To Arms.
The athletic legs suddenly filled the frame made by the small rug on the wood floor. Henry looked up at cold eyes.
The receptionist said, “Mr. Charles is free. You can go in now."
He walked down the hall behind the undulation of indelicate curves which filled the back of the gray dress.
Mr. Charles did not stand. Henry accepted the hint and sat in the chair on the opposite side of the desk without being asked.
The Realtor spoke perfunctorily after looking at Henry's clothes a moment too long.
"What can I do for you?"
The voice was high and nasal, as if bored by routine. The man had a mustache on a thin upper lip which exaggerated a mouth already too wide.
Henry checked the art reproductions on the office wall to see if any others were from the Gardner as he answered, but none were familiar. “You were the broker for Morgan Johnson's condominium on Marlborough Street."
An eyebrow as thin as the mustache rose slightly.
The Realtor said, “I still am."
Henry tried to keep the tone of his own voice disinterested. “Not if Arthur Johnson thinks too much about the fact that the sale was being done without his knowledge."
"Never take disrespect lightly,” his father often said. “Respect is the measure of a relationship. If someone shows you a lack of respect, show him something he'll remember for the next time."
Mr. Charl
es sat just a little bit straighter in his chair. “What business is it of yours?"
Henry studied the copy of a painting of an old man just to the left of the Realtor's head. It was a perfect distraction for the moment.
"I'm a friend of the family. I'm worried that people are being taken advantage of. There's been a murder, as you know. The estate is in probate. It could stay in probate for a long time if the situation is not resolved quickly. You won't be seeing any broker fees if there's a contest."
Mr. Charles's mustache turned down as Henry spoke, and then turned up at each end when Henry sat back in his chair.
"Yes. Well. That would be a pity for everyone concerned, wouldn't it? But what is it I can help you with, Mr.... Sullivan?"
Henry wondered if the man had actually forgotten his name. The realtor's voice had lowered in both tone and octave. Henry tried to look as serious as he could manage.
There was in fact a painting in the Dutch room at the Gardner, near the Rembrandt self-portrait and also painted by the master—An Old Man in Military Costume. It would fit Mr. Charles quite well, if the real-estate man's lip had not been so thin.
Henry said, “What was the price Morgan was asking on the condominium?"
This would be public information if Henry knew where to look for it, but more easily had now by asking.
The mustache barely moved with the answer. “Three and a quarter."
Henry asked, “And what was the offer?"
Now, this was more difficult. He was not at all sure the Realtor would tell him this much, but he might as well try.
The mustache moved, stopped, and moved again.
"There ... There were two offers. One for that amount, and one for three and a half."
Henry made a guess. “Isn't that a little low?"
"Well, yes. But Mrs. Johnson wanted to sell it before the end of the year. She had some plans."
Henry nodded, and let a beat of time pass before asking, “And why wasn't anything signed?"
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