Restoration (5 page)

“Instant ancestors, did you say?” asked Patrick.

“The nouveaux riches like to pretend they come from something. They have the money, they have the manse with the historic designation in the right Uptown neighborhood, they belong to a prestigious Carnival krewe. The only thing they’re lacking is the pedigree. Rhys can provide that. She buys these things at auction for next to nothing, then restores them and sells them as ancestral portraits to clients eager to say their family’s been in the city since it was founded.”

“When in fact the family was living in a trailer park in Chalmette only a generation before,” said Patrick.

“Ah, so you know the type, Mr. Marion.”

“What are you talking about, Joe? I
am
the type.”

I walked the length of the room, driving my boot heels hard against the red cypress flooring, freshly washed with mint oil. The walls had a nice patina created from orange brick and layers of desiccated paint, but much to my disappointment there were no firehouse poles or blaze-weary Dalmatians asleep in the shadows. Hanging alone on one side of the room was a portrait of perhaps the most unattractive person I’d ever seen. A broad, flat nose dominated his face, and his skinny lips were pulled back in a grin, revealing gray, diseased teeth. His skull, pocked and dented, sprouted a tuft of frizz over each shrunken ear. Unlike that unfortunate street person who looked like Joe Butler, when you happened upon this man you did not take him out for fried eggs and ham, and at night he did not rate a mention in your prayers. Instead, you ran from him screaming for 911. Another of the Guild’s name tags had been applied to the portrait. “Hello,” it said. “My name is… Jack.”

“Hey, bro, you weren’t supposed to see that,” Joe said.

“Then Rhys shouldn’t have put it there.”

“Rhys didn’t put it there, Mr. Charbonnet, I did. I should let you punch me out. My apologies. I mean it.”

“Am I missing something here?” I said. “We’ve never met before, have we?”

“No, we haven’t. But Rhys told me about Mr. Marion’s dinner party. How you had too much to drink and rolled around on the floor looking up skirts and everything. Also, Mr. Charbonnet, about how nice-looking you are in person, unlike the little picture they used to run over your stories in the paper.”

“Rhys knew me? She knew I wrote for the
Picayune?”

He shrugged. “What can I tell you?”

“I don’t know, Joe. What can you? Is there more?”

“Just that you were up on the subject of Levette. I don’t mean to leap to conclusions about you, Mr. Charbonnet, but they always try to get to Rhys that way. They fake it. They try to get her to the museum because they think that’s the quickest route to get her in bed. I’ve seen so many come and go by now, shit, bro, maybe I’m cynical. The last one pretended to be related to Picasso. Uncle Pablo, he called him.”

Patrick stood studying the hideous face in the painting with his hands held together behind his back. “Others might need instant ancestors,” he said, “but not you, Jack. This man has got to be the real thing. The resemblance is… well, shall I say it?”

“Go ahead.”

“Uncanny.”

“Can we see the Asmore now?” I said to Joe Butler.

They were still laughing as he led the way up a narrow oak stairway to the second floor. Joe banged a fist against a door, and after a couple of deadbolts were unlocked, Rhys stepped forward and greeted Patrick with a hug. I was hoping for the same treatment but all she offered was a handshake, and a less than enthusiastic one at that. It was at this moment that I understood how she felt about me. Rhys
was interested. Otherwise she would’ve embraced me as she had Patrick.

“Jack’s my good-luck charm,” Patrick said to Rhys, misreading the slight. “Plus, I thought I could use some protection traveling to your ‘hood.”

“Good, keep thinking that,” she said. “I’ve run a studio and lived in neighborhoods all over this city and I’ve had fewer problems here than in all of the others combined. I’ll keep the studio in Central City until this new generation of Goth kids and computer geeks finds us. I see a Bill Gates wannabe, or a boy with dyed black hair in ponytails, and wearing black clothes and jackboots, and quoting from Anne Rice—when those people come snooping around I am definitely a gone pecan.”

The second floor, decked like the first with shiny old boards, was where the Guild repaired paintings, porcelain and pottery. Rhys introduced us to her staff of artists, two of them young women who sat on plastic lunchroom chairs before easels holding paintings, the third an older man in a lab coat who stood at a worktable cleaning a picture of a riverboat. “You gentlemen have met Joe,” Rhys said. “He’s the Guild’s resident jack-of-all-trades, as proficient at building an exact replica of a Newcomb-Macklin frame as he is at filling in paint loss on a Martin Johnson Heade still life. Sarah and Morgan, like Joe, are retouch specialists who also patch and line paintings in need. Le-land here is the one who does all our cleaning. Patrick, Leland cleaned your Asmore. How many cotton balls did you say you used to get rid of that miserable shellac?”

“Three thousand one hundred and twenty-seven,” Leland said, “give or take a few.”

“That was only the first problem we had to overcome. Termites did such a job on the strainers that when you pressed on the wood it crumbled and turned to dust, and there was all that tunneling, more evidence they’d been there. It’s a miracle they didn’t eat the painting.”

“They wouldn’t dare,” Patrick said.

“Sure they would,” she said. “Termites will eat most anything they encounter. We’ve seen valuable paintings that were eaten to bits. Termites track upward from the soil munching away as they climb. In the wall of a house they devour the wood and the wallpaper and then whatever happens to be hanging on the wall. Paintings don’t stand a chance.”

“Tell them what else,” said Leland from his perch.

“Well, roaches love to eat paintings, too. Actually, they love the rabbitskin glue and wheat starch on the reverse of paintings that have been previously lined. Patrick, your dinner party the other day was nothing in the feast department compared to some of the meals I’ve seen roaches enjoy. Rodents like glue, too. People set rat traps with cheese, but they’d get more takers by pouring glue on the traps. There’s a world-famous antique store on Royal Street whose name I’d better not divulge. One morning the owner called and said he’d discovered that his most valuable painting had a huge hole in it. He couldn’t understand how this had happened. The painting was secure on the wall and hadn’t been moved in weeks, and the damage wasn’t a tear or a rip that would indicate it had fallen against anything. No, there was a jagged hole, as if it had been cut out with the serrated edge of a knife. The painting was a huge thing worth about a hundred thousand dollars. When we moved it to the studio Leland and the girls and I studied it under a loupe. You could see the teeth marks where a rat had supped on it. He’d come in from behind and eaten out a hole six inches in diameter, and the hole was in the most unpleasant of places.”

“Unpleasant?” said Patrick, in the exact moment when it occurred to him which part of the anatomy she meant. He looked down at the spot on his own person. “Thank you for that story, Rhys. Thank you ever so much. Of course I won’t be able to sleep tonight fearing a rat assault. You know those athletic cups baseball players fit into their jock straps to protect against stray balls? From here on out I sleep in one of those.”

“Sometimes I can’t get over the problems we’re asked to fix,” Rhys
said. “Your Asmore is nothing in comparison. As for the termite damage, we ended up replacing the strainers with stretcher bars made of poplar. Also, we played it safe and lined the burlap with Belgian linen and consolidated the painting to prevent against future losses. By consolidate I mean we massaged the surface with a mixture of beeswax and damar resin to readhere loose paint pieces and flakes. Joe did the retouch.”

“Did you have time to make a frame for it?”

“Yes. And you’re going to love what we did. It’s really beautiful: twenty-three-and-three-quarters-karat gold leaf with a gesso ground and yellow bole. Joe gets credit for that, too. He did the water gilding. And he carved the moulding by hand, working from a design that was popular with the American Impressionists.”

“Sounds expensive,” Patrick said.

“It’s
damned
expensive,” Rhys answered. “But don’t think about the money yet. You’ve taken the most important step by electing to conserve something that potentially could change your life. Even more significant, you’re doing a good thing. We don’t just patch old paintings here. We give them new life. We save them so that future generations can enjoy them. I’m proud of you, Patrick.”

We followed her into another large room, the first yet without worktables. It was Rhys’s office. Along one wall shelves bent under the weight of art history books and massive tomes with titles such as
The Preservation of Santos
and
The Structural Conservation of Panel Paintings.
A pair of partners desks held computers and digital camera equipment, along with small bronze sculptures, terra-cotta forms and more whatnots than the eye could absorb in a glance. Behind the desks stood racks for paintings in various stages of restoration. Some of the paintings, I would learn later, were worth as much as fifty thousand dollars, while the value of others couldn’t buy you a corn dog for lunch. Antique vitrines held Rhys’s pottery collection, one devoted to rare Van Briggle pieces, a second to vintage Shearwater, a third to creations by contemporary New Orleans potters such as JoAnn Green-berg and Charles Bohn.

There was much to see, and to take it all in one had to dodge a brass display easel standing in the middle of the floor bathed in light from a pair of strategically positioned photoflood lamps. A bedsheet, appropriately splattered with a rainbow of paints, covered the rectangular object on the stand.

“I’m being unusually dramatic today,” Rhys said, “but the occasion calls for it. When will I have the opportunity to unveil an Asmore again? Patrick, say hello to your Aunt Dottie. Or
Beloved Dorothy
, as Levette Asmore called her.”

The sheet came off and there it was suddenly, so different from the thing we’d seen on the floor at Patrick’s house. The portrait showed a young woman in a simple white dress holding a small book and a clutch of purple irises. Her brown hair was pulled back and held by a ribbon, and her eyes radiated a dark shade of blue that was nearly cobalt. It occurred to me that they were just like Patrick’s eyes. In the background Asmore had provided a Louisiana landscape with oak trees clotting the horizon and a red wash of sun reflecting off a winding river. But it was the subject of the painting that made the strongest impression. Dorothy Marion was so exquisitely beautiful that I felt an ache of sadness recalling Patrick’s story about how she had survived to be an old maid chasing garage-sale finds.

How does it happen? I wondered. We are young without a notion of how we’ll end up, stupid to the truth of what will come. Had someone told this girl she was destined to live her life alone in a dusty house full of cats she would have laughed herself silly.

Patrick’s hand went up. He reached to touch the painting.

“Better not,” Rhys said. “The varnish needs more time to dry.” She pointed to the upper-left corner. “Asmore’s signature is there, clearly visible. Leland and I screamed when it turned up during the cleaning.”

Both Patrick and I stepped closer, squinting to see it. Just beneath the name, Asmore had added the words “Beloved Dorothy,” and the date, “December 28, 1940.”

You poor bastard, I thought. Dead in less than a year.

“It’s very difficult for me to believe,” said Patrick. “I mean, Aunt Dottie? I knew this woman. She would sit at her kitchen table with her wig on backward, like how kids wear baseball caps. There’d be cats eating scraps from the dinner plates stacked in the sink. When she’d start on the old days I’d roll my eyes. She never even mentioned this Asmore character, but obviously they were a couple once. You look at this and it’s undeniable. She looks as if… okay, to put it bluntly, she looks as if he’s just had his way with her. They’ve made love, haven’t they?”

“Have either of you noticed the river in the painting’s background?” Rhys said. “When that came up during the cleaning, Leland and I screamed a second time. You can’t overstate how significant that is to the value of this painting. It portends Asmore’s terrible destiny. It also echoes an experience of his childhood: his parents drowned in the great flood of ’27, when Levette was just a boy. Patrick, I might have to ratchet my estimate upward another twenty thousand.”

“Really? Another twenty thousand?”

“They’re going to fight for this one,” she said. “The museums, the collectors, the dealers. There’s going to be a brawl on the auction house floor.”

His face was wet with tears. I might’ve offered warm words of congratulations, but I found that I, too, was on the verge of sobbing.

At least once a week I made a point of driving Uptown and visiting my mother. She still lived in the house where I grew up, over on Hampson Street near where Saint Charles Avenue, following the path of the Mississippi River, makes a hard turn and becomes South Carrollton Avenue. More than a hundred years old, the house is a big, wood-frame thing that stands behind a broken wood fence and a yard crowded with too many trees. It’s the kind of place people tend to feel sorry for, a feeling that only deepened when they learned that its only occupant, a widow three months out, still wept each day at the reality of life without her husband.