Pictures at an Exhibition (5 page)

“Forty thousand,” the auctioneer announced, “to Monsieur
Berenzon in the back.” A Drouot worker with brass buttons on his jacket parted the crowds and delivered a bid slip to my father. Father turned on his heel and, for a moment, the black lapels of his coat lifted off his chest and floated. He must relish, I imagined, how the bottoms of his fine shoes spun on the carpet. Then he left and did not look my way.

In turn, Rose, Auguste, and Ludovic all also bid on Sisleys and—whereas my father had won the most beautiful one—his three employees paid only a fraction of my father's grand sum. Each paid in crisp bills, so their funds were not recognizably the Berenzon Gallery's. My father wanted the whole lot of Sisleys—a sale of so many must have been unusual—but did not buy them all himself because the auctioneer knew him, sped the bidding along, and swelled the price. My throat tightened as I thought, Look, Father, I have learned just by watching you. You needn't have even explained to me these gears and their timing. It would have been enough just to have let me stand by while you played. But did you have to call upon Auguste and Ludovic for this favor? Why not your son?

I reached into the pocket of my second-best suit and crushed the smug blank check into a ball. Father had already purchased anything he could have wanted from this auction.

I understood then that this boon—the auction, the ten thousand francs—had not been my father's idea at all. It would have been my mother's, extracted from behind the bedroom door.

“Sorry you didn't win that Sisley,” the Greek said to me and patted my arm. “You won't go home empty-handed today, young man. I have a good intuition for you.”

“We will pause here at Lot Fifty-seven for an exceptional occasion,” the auctioneer trilled.

“Such a peacock,” the Greek said. “Nothing but professionals here,” he complained again.

“A remarkable masterpiece, ladies and gentleman: the
Ham
, by Edouard Manet, a work from 1875, nearing the end of the artist's life, heretofore in a private collection.” The room rustled to life like the sound of a cloud of bees sweeping in.

“Somewhere a rich man is burning his furniture to heat the mansion,” the Greek said with a laugh. I slid him a sideways glance because my mind was racing in the other direction: Surely the Manet was a last-minute addition. Father would not have left if he had known it was for sale. This happens once in a lifetime, I thought. Rose and Auguste and Ludovic had spent my father's bills, but with my blank check I could buy it. For Father. Or for myself—I could build a collection around a Manet.

“We'll begin bidding at seven thousand francs,” the auctioneer sang. As I raised my hand, René Huyghe's haggard face leaned into my field of vision.
No
, he mouthed at me.
Fake.
I shook my head; I didn't believe him. He would have a proxy there. He wanted this painting for his museum.

Father had allotted me ten thousand francs and bidding quickly raced past this mark. The colors in the room grew brilliant and bright, and I felt as if I were hovering half a meter above the floor. What luck fate had brought me, just to be there! I hardly heard the amounts I agreed to, I only nodded, raised five fingers, and felt the auctioneer hook his eyes into mine.

Manet's
Ham
hulked in the center of the canvas and was humble in its scale; if it was a life-size portrait of a ham, then it was a ham for an old man without a wife. The knife in the foreground had a worn handle and a dull bent blade. It was not the great quivering pink meat I had seen on the Sunday tables of my father's friends whose names I often read in the newspapers, houses in which everyone watched to see if we would eat their roast.

Rose had the palm of her hand pressed to her forehead. René thrashed in his seat, drew his finger across his neck, then stood to leave. “I won't watch you do this,” he said. I turned my face back to the painting and raised my hand to shade my eyes. The auction room's lights glared off the surface of the canvas. My father often said, “A beautiful painting makes me want to shield my eyes. I buy when I have to look away.”

A man with the posture of a gendarme bid a few meters from me. He wore the rosette of the Legion of Honor on his coat, and I
watched his jaw muscles clench and grind between each bid. He had bought several other paintings already—he would start thinking about the money soon, wouldn't he, the vast sum, with the auctioneer's fees on top of it? When he bowed his head and reached out to hold the hand of the woman standing beside him, I knew I'd won. “No more,” he said. His wife looked downcast.
My boy! My boy!
I could hear my father say, as he rose from his desk chair, beaming. Finally, I thought. Now it can all begin!

The Drouot assistant strode toward me, arm outstretched, as if he would just hand off the sales slip that was my everything.

“Your name?” he asked, eyeing a blonde in a thin blouse. When I told him, he said, “Of course,” and laughed when I withdrew the creased check from my pocket. I had to ask him for the amount, and when he said seventy thousand francs I felt my knees give. My hand shook as I wrote.

I waited through the next six auctions. My mouth tasted of metal. Rose followed me out the door, where René lay in wait, talking to himself and making small angry gestures. He grabbed me by the wrist, sputtering.

“Hello, René,” I said.

“From ten rows away, it's a suspect object.”

“We're at Drouot's.”

“There are plenty in this business who are crooked. Like the Galerie Zola scandal.” I hardly heard René speak. “Think about Manet,” the curator pleaded. “He wanted to build up paint on the canvas in three dimensions. For the paint to emphasize that it is
material.
Gauguin mixed wax into his to dull it. Your
Ham
shines like a Dutch master.”

Rose looked away and my lungs constricted. She agreed with René, then.

“Varnished,” Rose said. “Licked.”

René kept one hand over his forehead, as if when he let go of it his skull might fall apart into its bones. “Your father—” he faltered. “We have to see Arthur.”

“Arthur?” I asked.

“At the cash register,” Rose said.

We hurried to keep pace with René, who had gone galumphing down the stairs, as much falling down them as running. “He's worried what your father will think,” Rose whispered, “knowing that René was present when you bought the painting. Your father supplements his salary, just like he does with mine and the director at the Jeu de Paume.”

A gnomish man with a full beard and pointed ears greeted René from behind a pane of glass.
CAISSE
, read a gold plaque beside a sliding window, which the gnome raised. “René,” he said in a tetchy voice. “You never come to visit anymore.”

“Arthur.” René was short of breath. “Sajan put a fake Manet on the block upstairs, and Daniel Berenzon's boy here bought it. You have to nullify the auction. The son's name isn't on the account, so to buy it in the father's name is the same as a stranger doing it. It's an illegal transaction through and through.”

The gnome hummed while René spoke. “Now, now. The young man here seems perfectly calm. He is Daniel Berenzon's son, after all. Remember, we too are a family business. We welcome Berenzon's heir here as Ulysses was hailed by the Phaeacians. And we happily waive any paper-signing claptrap under such exciting circumstances.” The gnome turned his lamplike eyes on me. “In fact, we've all been wondering why he's hidden you from us.” He extended his hand. “Welcome into our family, young Berenzon. I heard it was quite an auction. I might have flown upstairs to marvel, but you see, it was over so quickly I hadn't the time.”

René pulled my hand from the gnome's damp grasp. “Exactly!” he shouted. Rose looked pained. “No Manet is going to sell in four minutes. Seventy thousand francs is a fortune, to be sure, but the last Manet the Jeu de Paume bought five years ago was three times that. The cost alone is an argument against its authenticity. Don't you agree?”

“These are difficult times, René. Many are leaving Paris, selling their artwork for whatever it will fetch. The world is not a stable place. Our currency is fickle. Art! Art is the only solid investment. Art and bullion.” The gnome smiled, revealing his gold teeth. “When the Luftwaffe first appear in the sky over Paris, will you have
time to rush to Crédit Lyonnais and wait in line with all its other weeping clients, or will you pluck your fortune off the wall and make for the countryside?”

“I shouldn't go to the bank at all,” said Rose. “I'd find a pistol and—”

“This is a waste of time,” René said. “I'd like to speak with Mr. Drouot.”

“Don't,” I begged.

René already stood on the second step of the stairs. “Why?”

Must he ask? Because I wanted to appear strong in front of Rose. Because my father would detest any public acknowledgment of a mistake. The voices in my mind began to roar.

“Max?” René asked. I shook my head, took leave of them, and returned to Room Six. I handed one of the uniformed men my claim slip, gave him delivery instructions, and took the back staircase to the foyer. I touched the pocket where the check had been. I did not know how much seventy thousand francs was worth, but the thought of the number made me wince.

“Max?” Rose called, but I did not stop. I pushed past the knot of people lingering before the door and into the whipping March wind.

A flock of seagulls swooped low over the street, crying bitterly. The round portal windows of Drouot's and the dampness of the air heightened my sensation of being near the ocean during a storm. I recalled leaving my father on this corner when I was a young boy, though at the time I did not think to ask why he separated from us here. With the romance of an eight-year-old, I was more preoccupied with the journey that Mother and I would continue on without him. Auguste had driven us up the rue des Martyrs, past the cobblestones glittering with scales from the fish dealers and the dusty windows of the antique booksellers, to the foot of Sacré-Cœur, which I told Mother was made of chalk, and she said
No, plaster of Paris, that's how the stuff got its name.
At the church, we fed two centimes into the binoculars and Mother lifted me up to look through them. I told her what I saw: the long steely roofs of the Comédie Française, the flags of a military parade, a windmill (“It's a dance hall,” she said), the Eiffel Tower, and an invalid girl carried up the stairs in a chair.

I made Mother recount the story of how Saint Denis walked for hours after having his head cut off, and how he finally laid it down where we stood and declared a church should be built there, at the apex of the hill. We strolled to a small plaza behind the church where a dozen men in suspenders and berets had set up their wooden easels. They called out to us, and Mother chose one with an Italian accent to sketch my portrait on a piece of butcher's paper.

We rode the funicular down to the plaza of Saint-Pierre. Strong gusts made the cable car swing and jounce. Father met us in front of Drouot's, a wooden crate under his arm. He had disliked the butcher-paper portrait. “Ten francs for
that
! But it's not even our son! They must have given you some ugly boy's picture by mistake.”

“Until Pablo paints his portrait,” my mother had said, “you leave me no other choice than to patronize the fine artists of the place du Sacré-Cœur.” Her voice had been strained.

“Berenzons don't have their portraits painted anymore,” my father had replied, as if he knew that would make her cry. At the time, I had disregarded the strangeness of this and only considered it one of the many inexplicable interactions of childhood. I had assumed my parents spoke of the foreign world that existed before I came into this one.

Outside Drouot's, I raised my head at the clattering of bells from the campanile of Notre-Dame-de-Lorette. I could hear the
tap-tap
of a woman's shoes hurrying behind me. The blanched dome of Sacré-Cœur loomed above and I walked toward it. The rest of the heavens darkened for rain, but somehow Sacré-Cœur remained light and flickering. I pictured the amateur portraitists in the square beyond the church, how they would run for cover when the angry rains began and how they would call out from beneath striped restaurant awnings to sketch the faces of those who hurried by. I resolved to walk until it began to rain. By then, Father would know of my mistake and I could return home.

WHEN AT LAST I WAS ON RUE DE LA BOéTIE
, I found my father, much to my surprise, sitting in the gallery, wearing his coat
and gloves, with the Manet fake unwrapped on an easel before him. The canvas was no bigger than the cover of a dictionary. A magnifying glass rested on the table beside him, and a full ashtray.

“Good, you're home,” he said. “I was worried you were going to do something clever like throw yourself in the Seine.” He clapped me on the shoulder. “I spoke with Robert de Rothschild while you were out. He said if it was a fake, then it would be the work of this fellow who poses as a Hungarian noble, Baron von Horty. Rothschild has had some dealings with him as well, though I think the false pedigree was the part that irked Robert most. I don't know why Robert's being so kind to us, but he sent his lawyer over to the Conciergerie, and von Horty confirmed that our Manet is part of his forged œuvre. Von Horty's as strange a fellow as you can imagine. He's blackmailed some senator to keep him in the fashion to which he has grown accustomed. He has a beautiful harpsichord right there in the jail with him, which requires tuning every week since it's so damp.” When a matter interested Father, he moved at lightning speed.

That night, during our silent dinner, amid the loud clanking of silverware against plate, my mind churned. I was responsible for several losses of varying sizes. I had made a fool of myself before my father and Rose. I had begged my father to draw me into his business dealings, yet when given a test I had failed. I pushed myself away from the table and gathered the painting from my father's office in the gallery.

“Where are you going with that?” Father said. “Don't destroy it! Fakes are excellent instruction! They teach us lessons!” he shouted to my back, as I hurried upstairs.