Pictures at an Exhibition (6 page)

I dragged a suitcase from the recesses of the storage alcove in my bedroom. I opened it, and a cockroach scuttled away, leaving his dead comrades behind. When I swept them out, their dried wings and shells crackled. I stowed the painting in one of the valise's inner pouches. The parcel made it sag. I closed the case with a thud and clicked its latches shut.

It was as if a key had turned inside me. I had wanted to twin the stupid, sullen
Ham
with my father's
Almonds.
Each mute still life
needed its mate; each was too bleak without the other. I felt nearly drunk when I bought the
Ham.
Father's joy at my triumph would have outrun his surprise at the price. I had let my mind close down on my doubts like a steel door. I did not consider that my father regarded my mistake as a rite of passage—that any collector who says he has never made a questionable purchase is a liar.

I sat atop the suitcase with my head in my hands, for how long I did not know.

Then my father was before me. “Why are you sitting there in the dark?” he asked, and kept his hand around mine until he opened the door into the hallway.

When we stepped out into the light I became a man again, and we both let go.

Chapter Four

T
HE NEXT DAY, I LISTENED TO THE RADIO WITH
Mother. a Russian diplomat explained the importance of Finnish territorial concessions lest the Germans invade the Hanko peninsula or use Karelia or Lapland as the bridgehead from which to attack Leningrad. It seemed to me that they were talking about Mars. Mother turned off the radio and played a few bars of music.

“When I hear Finland, I think of Sibelius,” she said. I looked out the window at the haze around the winter sun. “My teacher heard Sibelius give a lecture on the overtones one hears in a meadow.”

“You hear those, too,” I said.

“Not a meadow,” Mother said. “At least, not usually. We don't spend much time in meadows. Yet.” Mother repeated daily her desire to leave Paris. All cities, she thought, were at risk. She played a few more bars of music. “Here's someone else,” she said.

“It sounds the same.”

“It's not.” She played one phrase, and then another. “That's Sibelius.” More notes. “And that's Mussorgsky, who came first. But I can't blame the Finn.” She played some more. Finally, she said, “One can hardly blame a copyist.” I realized then what she was trying to say. This was her own oblique, nearly opaque forgiveness, then, for my transgression.

In my youth, it had come as a revelation to consider that some of
my mother's strangeness was a result of her speaking to me in a language that was not her native tongue. With the crisis in Europe, though, as Mother grew ever more unusual, I decided that she would have been perplexing in any language. Or rather, that language for her was a necessity but not her preferred means of communication. Thus, during an explanation such as this, it was best to sit quietly. I had not the training to discuss Sibelius or Mussorgsky. At times I wished I had continued the music lessons of my childhood. As an adolescent, this same kind of wish had led me to study Polish, secretly, for a few months in hopes that one day I would speak to my mother in a proud declarative sentence and she would answer me with joy and clarity. Sadly, perhaps because gifts of music and language are often linked, I possessed neither one.

She was now playing a new piece.
“Pictures at an Exhibition.
Mussorgsky wrote this for the painter Victor Hartmann, who died young. They had an exhibition of his watercolors, and Mussorgsky went and composed a piece for each of the paintings. A composition that accompanied him throughout the exhibit. This, the
Promenade
that I am playing, means Mussorgsky was walking between paintings. Movement One. And the first painting he saw was
The Gnome
, and that's Movement Two.” She played the
Promenade
theme again. “Listen to how dignified and precise the rhythm is. Then he sees another painting”—I could hear a key change—“and that's
The Old Castle.
This is the closest you can ever get to that exhibition. They say all of Hartmann's paintings have been lost, so there is only the music. And Mussorgsky drank himself to death.”

THAT SAME MARCH, MOTHER DEVELOPED A NERVOUS
cramp in her right hand that gripped her four fingers into a claw, leaving only the thumb mobile. It appeared spasmodically, and no doctor could treat or diagnose it. Her performing schedule was curtailed. No longer tied to the symphony season, she clamored for a move south. There was a known specialist in Nice and a hypnotist in Bordeaux. The humid climate might be good for her clenched muscles. Father delayed. Mother practiced Ravel's
Concerto for Left Hand.

March of that year also beheld the last great exhibition at the Berenzon Gallery—though of course we did not know this at the time—with works by Degas and Cézanne. Mother insisted on attending the opening, though she gave guests her left hand and retired earlier than usual. Somehow, Father must have warned the company of her condition: there were no requests for a performance, no coterie of tipsy favorites afterward, upstairs, leaning against the piano and singing.

When the pyramids of cakes and champagne glasses had been cleared away, my father and I sat on the divan, shoulders touching.

I anticipated the ritual with painful pleasure. Father could be cruel and dismissive of me during the day, before my mother or Rose, but when it was evening and the green carpet turned the gallery into a forest glade, my father was a different man from the one others saw during daylight.

With my eyes shut, I recited the paintings and he listed their dimensions.

“At the Milliner's,”
I said. “A woman trying on a hat. This is more muted than later works, because Degas is not going blind yet so there's no need to paint in those iridescents.”

We heard a glass break upstairs. “These fits!” Father stood and stamped his foot. “Whatever pills that quack gave your mother aren't doing anything but making her hair fall out.” I heard Mother wail. We both started.

Still, I did not want Father to go to her yet. I needed to ask him
something.
A thought gnawed at me. Father made to leave, then paused. “You're too old to recite paintings every night with your father, aren't you?” Before I could reply, he closed the door, and I heard him take the stairs to the apartments two at a time.

I lit a cigarette and continued to mutter the names of the paintings.

Someone entered the room behind me. “They say talking to yourself is a sign of money in the bank.” Rose's voice was throaty, and she wore an orange silk dress I recognized as one of my mother's castoffs.

The ceiling above us creaked and groaned. Water rushed through the pipes. Father drew Mother a bath. There was splashing and murmuring voices. First Mother laughed, then Father.

Still standing, Rose made one full turn, as if she were seeing the gallery for the first time. “Imagine growing up with a father who discussed fine art—his fine art—with you every night.”

“He won't talk about much else with me,” I said.

“Still,” she said, “consider the alternative.”

I nodded, unsure of what to say.

To my surprise, Rose sat beside me and shut her eyes. “Where shall we begin?” she asked.

I paused, hoping to avoid the Degas ballerina statue thrusting her bronzed chin and narrow rib cage in our direction. She was eerie, too childlike and too suggestive.

But Rose pointed to the Degas.
“Little Dancer Aged Fourteen.
Not beautiful, yet inviting, and likely a prostitute.” Rose tilted her head like a bird.

“They were in an impossible situation,” I said.

“Call it what you will. The original was wax, with real human hair and a tutu, and it made the crowds furious.”

Upstairs, my mother turned on her radio. Music this time, not the news.

“Le nozze di Figaro,”
Rose whispered. Mother had taken her to the opera some weeks earlier, when the orange dress must have been exchanged. I had a sudden vision of Rose pinning the syllables of Mozart's title like a banner on a clothesline.
“Non so più.
My heart hurts, it is so beautiful.” She touched her fingers there.

“Bertrand brought a dancer from Pigalle back here once,” I began, aware that my brain was not permitting me to fix ideas (dancer, prostitute, Bertrand, painting, the humming feeling in my blood) together in a sensible way. “She kept asking how much each painting was worth and was disappointed that I didn't know. I made up a figure and she said, ‘Oh, that's not a lot of money’”

“Why didn't you know?” Rose asked. “Why did you bring her to the gallery?”

“It was Bertrand. They left after ten minutes.”

The knuckles on her hand touched my own. We were both exhausted from the party. Her soft speech made me want to lean in and listen to the small intake of her breath. I flushed. I could not
think. What would my father have done? I pictured him in my place, a young man, holding her, threading her hair between his fingers, looking at
Almonds
while he kissed her.

So I drew her face to mine. I could smell the familiar honeysuckle scent behind her ears and on her neck. Upstairs, I heard the radio turn on and off, then on again, then off. It was my parents, fighting over the dial and its stream of bad news. The orange silk skirt of Rose's dress pooled around her legs. I thought of the poem where the woman says,
I am half sick of shadows.
The bells outside rang midnight, then the first hour of the day.

Rose whispered, between our breaths, “Your father paid three hundred thousand francs for the Degas in 1931 and did not exhibit it for five years. Then Alain de Leonardis bought it for a million francs.” She let me unhook her brassiere. “The Cézanne sold for sixty thousand at auction and your father has reserved it for the Mariotti collection for eight hundred thousand francs.”

I put my hands under the hem of her dress and lifted it to her waist. Rose gasped. I grew dizzy and single-minded. She pushed me away when I tried, with what I thought was considerable charm, to remove another article of clothing. “The Picasso was part of a lot: three paintings for three hundred seventy-five thousand francs. The nude alone will sell for three hundred fifty thousand.” The church told us it was half-past two. We began to fall asleep kissing. Soon dawn hovered outside the diamond-paned skylight, a gray cat pressing its back against the glass. “The almonds seem to glow, don't they?” she said.

“It's strange that my father has never been able to sell it,” I said, and tried to kiss her some more. She drew away.

“Max, I file his correspondence. He gets letters every week asking after that one—from São Paulo, New York, Peking—and he just tells me to throw them out.
Almonds
is not for sale. He bought it for thirty thousand francs in 1918 from—”

“Yes, I know,” I said. I didn't.

The diamond-paned glass grew light. I gathered up Rose's shawl. Holding her shoes, Rose made her way toward her apartment, and I could swear the paintings turned to look.

As we crossed from the gallery to the hallway leading up to the Nurse's Room, Rose put her hand back to stop me. My father stood before Rose's door, still dressed in his tuxedo. Twice he lifted his hand to knock, then dropped it to his side. Shaking his head, he thrust his fists in his pockets and walked back to the kitchen.

“What …” I began.

Rose shook her head. “I don't know.”

I left her. It was nearly 5 a.m. I heard the cook moving about and the hiss of gas and the clank of a cabinet sprung open. A pot rattled against its shelf and then against the stove.

WHEN MADRID CAPITULATED AND VALENCIA CLOSELY
followed, my Anatomy professor Negrín, whom I had never really thought of as Spanish, stepped in front of a train at Abbesses. According to the newspapers, Negrín had shouted, “Death to the Fifth Column!” I suspected the paper embroidered the details of his suicide. He had been a soft-spoken man.

Our exam was therefore postponed. I had attended the class in only a desultory fashion, it was true, yet I could not believe that Professor Negrín had died, and thus for once I reviewed for the test. Rose offered to help. We studied in the Jardin Labouré, which was garishly sunny and blooming.

“Did you go to the lecture today?” Rose asked, her voice odd.

“No,” I replied. I did not want to see Negrín's substitute at the front of the hall, pretending that nothing had happened.

“Will you get the notes?”

“No intention of it.”

“Ivan said the lecture was interesting—”

“He's a brute.”

“—on the birth ailments of children.”

“You shouldn't talk to him.”

“He came to the Louvre to tell me about a case study from your class.”

“I have enough case studies here at home,” I said.

“I'll say,” said Rose.

Though the sun remained bright overhead, we heard a gathering storm of tapping, like the sound of a rain shower coming in.

“I left my umbrella at home,” Rose said.

I lifted my gaze to the parted garden gate, and we watched a stream of blind children pass by, walking quickly and ticking their canes, laughing and calling out to one another. “Cailleux has three new Matisses in his gallery,” Rose said, after the children were gone from the street. “And your father has an exclusive contract with Henri for
première vue.
You understand what that means. Henri can choose what he might want to sell privately or keep in his own collection, but after that your father is the only dealer who can sell the paintings when they first go on the market.”

I nodded. “So tell him. He'll be hopping mad.”

“No,” Rose said, closing my anatomy book with a clap, “you are going to pay the Cailleux Gallery a visit. I have my own suspicions, but I want to hear what you think before I tell you.” She walked ahead of me out of the garden. “Go and beguile whatever imbecile is working there. Pretend you're interested in buying and ask all the naive questions you're afraid to ask your father—or me—about the paintings. He'll fall right into your lap.” I grabbed her by the waist, and she let me kiss her, briefly, and then appeared to change her mind.