My reputation as a critic didn’t soar, but my workload doubled and, with it, my income. Tom Russell gave me a fifty-dollar raise, which brought me up to four fifty a month at the magazine. My lecture fee was raised, and I gave more lectures, including a lecture at Columbia on “New Trends in Contemporary Art” to the art majors—and the Fine Arts Department paid me a six-hundred-dollar lecture fee. To lecture in my old school, where I had once been a poverty-stricken graduate student, was perhaps the high point of the entire year.
My agent unloaded some older, unsold articles I had written months before—two of them to art magazines which had earlier rejected them.
I had always done a certain amount of jury work, judging art shows for “expenses only,” and more often without any compensation at all. I now began to receive some decent cash offers to judge and hang important exhibits at major museums. On a jury show I served on at Hartford, there was a Herb Westcott painting entered in the show. Westcott had changed his style to Romantic Realism, and his fine, almost delicate draftsmanship was well suited to the new style. The Hartford show had an antipollution theme, and Westcott had painted an enormous blowup of a 1925 postcard view of Niagara Falls. The painting wasn’t in the First Prize category, but I was able to persuade the other jury members (the museum director and Maury Katz, a hard-edge painter) to tag Westcott’s painting with an honorable mention and a thousand-dollar purchase prize. I had treated Westcott rather shabbily in Palm Beach, running out on him and his show at Gloria’s Gallery, and it pleased me to give him a leg up—which he well deserved in any case.
Now included in my books to review were books that the managing editor used to reserve for himself—beautiful, expensive, handsomely illustrated, coffee-table art books—that retailed for twenty-five, thirty-five, and even fifty dollars. After being reviewed, these expensive books can be sold at half of their wholesale price to bookdealers. This pocketed cash is found money I.R.S. investigators cannot discover easily.
I no longer slept well. I didn’t sleep well at all.
I knew that Debierue had read my article, and although I had made an educated guess that he would say nothing, I could not be positive that he would continue to say nothing. I had dared to assume that four important European art critics had also invented imaginary paintings by Debierue to write about. But they couldn’t denounce me. Only Debierue could do that and, thanks to the fire I had set, he couldn’t actually prove anything.
Nevertheless, late at night, I often awoke from a fitful sleep, covered with perspiration. Sitting in the dark on the edge of my bed, trying to keep my mind as blank as possible, I would light one cigarette after another, afraid to go back to sleep. In time, I would tell myself, all in good time, my nightmares would run their course and stop.
A year later, almost to the day that I returned to New York, Debierue died in Florida. Mr. Cassidy wired me, inviting me to the funeral, but I was tied up with other work and couldn’t get away on such short notice. Bodies, in Florida, must be buried within twenty-four hours, according to the state law. I wrote the obituary—a black-bordered one-page tribute—for the magazine, of course, inasmuch as I was the authority on Debierue, and had already written the definitive piece on him for the forthcoming International Encyclopedia of Fine Arts.
Ten days after Debierue’s death I received a long, bulky package at the office. When I unwrapped it at my desk I discovered the dismantled baroque frame that had once been Debierue’s famous No. One. This unexpected gift from beyond the grave made me cry, the first time I had wept in several months. There was no personal note or card with the frame. Debierue had probably left word with someone at the nursing home to mail it to me after he died. But the fact that he sent me the frame meant exoneration. Not only a complete exoneration, it proved that he had been pleased by my critique of his “American Harvest” period. From all of his many critics, Debierue had singled me out as his beneficiary for No. One.
The dismantled frame had no intrinsic value, of course. I probably could have sold it somewhere, or donated it to the Museum of Modern Art for its curiosity value, but I couldn’t do that to the old man. His gesture deeply moved me.
I walked down the hall to throw the frame down the incinerator. As I opened the metal door, I noticed a small dead fly scotch-taped to one of the sides of the frame. The old man, despite his age, had a keen memory. After seeing the fly, I couldn’t throw the parts down the chute. On my way home from the office I left the bundled frame under my seat in the subway instead.
I had some correspondence with Joseph Cassidy concerning The Burnt Orange Heresy. He wanted me to suggest the best place for unveiling it for the public, New York or Chicago. I advised him to wait and to exhibit the painting at Palm Beach instead, at the opening of the next season, to coincide, as nearly as possible, with the publication date of the International Encyclopedia of Fine Arts, which would have a full-page color plate of the painting facing my definitive article on the painter . . .
. . . I opened the heavy volume and found my piece on Jacques Debierue. The color plate of The Burnt Orange Heresy was a beautiful reproduction of the painting. Reduced in size, color photographs often look better than the original oils. And this colored photo, on expensive, white-coated stock, shone like burnished gold.
I read my article carefully. There were no errors in spelling, and no typographical errors. My name was spelled correctly at the end of the article. A short bibliography of the books and major critical articles on Debierue followed my by-line, set in 5½-point agate boldface. There were no typos in the bibliography, either.
Satisfied, I began to leaf through some of the other volumes of the Encyclopedia, here and there, to check the writing and the quality of the work. I read pieces on some of my favorites—Goya, El Greco, Piranesi, Michelangelo.
My stomach became queasy, and I had a peculiar premonition. The articles I had read were well researched and well written, particularly the piece on Piranesi, but my stomach felt as if it had been filled with raw bread dough that was beginning to rise and swell inside me. I opened my desk drawer and took out my brass ruler. Taking my time, to make certain there would be no mistakes, I measured the column inches in the Encyclopedia to see how many inches had been allotted to Goya, El Greco, Piranesi, Michelangelo—and Debierue.
Goya had nine and one-half inches. El Greco had twelve. Piranesi had eight. Michelangelo had fourteen. But Debierue had sixteen column inches! The old man, insofar as space was concerned, had topped the greatest artists of all time.
I closed the books, all of them, and returned them to the crate. I lit a cigarette and moved to the window. The buttery sunlight of Palm Beach scattered gold coins beneath the poinciana tree outside my window. The dark green grass in the apartment-house courtyard was still wet from the sprinklers the yardman had recently turned off. The pale blue sky, without any clouds, unpolluted by industrial smoke, was as clear as expensively bottled water. I wasn’t fooled by the air-conditioning of the room. It was hotter than hell outside in the sun.
But my work was over. Debierue had triumphed over everyone, and so had I. There would never be another Jacques Debierue, not in my lifetime, and I would never want to meet another one like him if one ever did come along. There was no place else for me to go as an art critic. How could I top myself? Not in this world.
But what about Berenice Hollis? Could I pass the test? In a cigar box in the bottom drawer of my dresser, together with a picture of my father, taken when he was seven years old, and a dry, rough periwinkle shell (a reminder, because I had picked it up on the beach as a kid, that I was born in Puerto Rico), was Berenice’s dried finger, wrapped in a linen handkerchief. I unrolled the handkerchief and looked at the shriveled finger. The blood-red Chen Yu nail varnish was dull, and some of it had flaked off. I looked at the finger for a long time without feeling fear, pain, or remorse.
Debierue, and his achievement, had been worth it, and there was nothing else left for me to do. Somebody else, another critic, could cov
er the unveiling of Cassidy’s only signed Debierue at the Everglades Club. The time had come for me to pay my dues for the death of Berenice Hollis.
I showered, shaved, and put on my tailor-made suit, together with a white shirt, a wide red-white-and-blue striped tie, black silk socks, and polished cordovan shoes.
Taking my time, strolling, I walked through the late afternoon streets to the Spanish-style Palm Beach police station. No one else would ever know the truth about Debierue, and no one, other than myself, knew the truth about my part in his apotheosis. And I would never tell, never, but I had to pay for Berenice. The man who achieves success in America must pay for it. It’s the American way, and no one knows this fact of life any better than I, a de–islanded Puerto Rican.
There were a sergeant and two patrolmen inside the station. One patrolman was going on duty and the other was going off, but they both looked so clean and well groomed it would have been impossible to tell them apart. All three policemen were looking at a copy of Palm Beach Life, the slick, seasonal magazine that covers Palm Beach society. The policeman going off duty had his picture in it—a shot of a group of women on a garden tour, and he was smiling in the background.
“Good afternoon, sir,” the sergeant said politely, getting to his feet, “may I help you?”
I nodded. “Good afternoon, Sergeant,” I replied. I unfolded the handkerchief on the table, and Berenice’s finger rolled out. “I want to confess to a crime of passion.”
About the Author
Charles Willeford was a professional horse trainer, boxer, radio announcer, and painter, as well as the author of over a dozen novels, including The Burnt Orange Heresy, Pick-Up, Cockfighter, and Miami Blues, a collection of short stories, and a memoir of his war experiences. He was a tank commander with the Third Army in World War II. For his war efforts he received the Silver Star, the Bronze Star, the Purple Heart, and the Luxembourg Croix de Guerre. He also studied art in Biarritz, France, and in Lima, Peru, and English at the University of Miami. He died in 1988.
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