The Company She Keeps (3 page)

She was, or soon would be, a Young Divorcee, and the term still carried glamour. Her divorce decree would be a passport conferring on her the status of citizeness of the world. She felt gratitude toward the Young Man for having unwittingly effected her transit into a new life. She looked about her at the other passengers. Later she would talk to them. They would ask, of course, where she was bound; that was the regulation opening move of train conversations. But it was a delicate question what her reply should be. To say “Reno” straight out would be vulgar; it would smack of confidences too cheaply given. Yet to lie, to say “San Francisco,” for instance, would be to cheat herself, to minimize her importance, to mislead her interlocutor into believing her an ordinary traveler with a commonplace destination. There must be some middle course which would give information without appearing to do so, which would hint at a
vie galante
yet indicate a barrier of impeccable reserve. It would probably be best, she decided, to say “West” at first, with an air of vagueness and hesitation. Then, when pressed, she might go as far as to say “Nevada.” But no farther.

M
R. SHEER FIRED HIS
stenographer in order to give me the job. It puzzled me at the time that he should so readily dismiss a professional whom he paid ten dollars a week to take on an amateur at eleven. I now see that he must have owed her money. Several times during that summer she would come into the gallery, a badly made-up blond girl in a dark dress that the hot days and the continual sitting had wrinkled at the waist. He would hold whispered conversations with her in the outer room, and at length she would go away. Later on, after I had quit, I, too, would make regular calls to collect my back pay, and there would be another girl sitting at my desk, while I, as a mark of special courtesy, would be led into the inner exhibition room reserved for customers. There he would whisper to me, and, on a few occasions, press into my hand, as if it were something indecent, a tightly folded five-dollar bill. After a great many visits I succeeded in getting, in such small driblets, all that was owed me, but my case was exceptional. Mr. Sheer’s usual method of dealing with a creditor was simply to dispense with his services. This worked quite well with everyone but the telephone company, for, while there are many stationers, many photographers, many landlords, there is only one American Tel. & Tel.

Mr. Sheer was extremely resourceful in financial matters. It was he who taught me how to get a free lemonade on a stifling day. You go into the Automat (there was one conveniently located across the street from our building), and you pick up several of the slices of lemon that are put out for the benefit of tea drinkers near the tea tap. Then you pour yourself a glass of ice water, squeeze the lemon into it, add sugar from one of the tables, and stir.

Mr. Sheer was a dealer in objects of art, a tall, pale-eyed man with two suits and many worries. Downstairs in the building directory he was listed as The Savile Galleries, and the plural conveyed a sense of endless vistas of rooms gleaming with collector’s items. Like Mr. Sheer himself, that plural was imaginative, winged with ambition, but untrustworthy. Actually, the Savile Galleries consisted of two small, dark, stuffy rooms whose natural gloom was enhanced by heavy velvet drapes in wine-red and blackish green which were hung from ceiling to floor with the object of concealing the neutral office-building walls. There was also another and still smaller room which had no drapes and was therefore more cheerful, but this was merely the inner office where the stenographer and the Negro boy assistant were herded, together with the office supplies, the
Social Register,
and
Poor’s Business Directory,
and where the sitter for a miniature in progress was occasionally tied.

For Mr. Sheer’s gallery was unique in one respect. On my first day there I had stared hopefully about at the shabby collection of priests’ robes, china figurines, clocks, bronzes, carved ivories, old silver, porcelains, and seen only the scrapings of the Fifty-ninth Street auction rooms. In a glass case off in one corner, there were a few garnet chokers, some earrings in wrought Italian silver, and an improbable-looking sapphire ring in an out-of-date claw setting. On the walls hung a couple of faded paintings of the Hudson River School and some gaudy scenes of Venice, which, as I learned later, had been signed by Mr. Sheer with any Italian name that happened to come into his head. (As he said, there was nothing really wrong with this practice of his: it made the customer feel better to see
some
name on a picture, and it was not, after all, as if he were attributing them to Raphael.) But that morning, knowing nothing of Mr. Sheer, I had looked about at all those tarnished objects (I had been led to expect something grander, more artistic, more “interesting”) and tears had come to my eyes as I wondered how I should describe this dreary job to my family and friends. It was then that I noticed the smell.

“Dogs,” Mr. Sheer said. “Wear your dog on your sleeve.” I stared at him. He went into the inner office and came back with a jeweler’s box in which lay a pair of crystal cuff links. Buried in the crystals, one could see a tiny pair of scotties. “They’re real portraits,” he said. “We do them right here in the gallery. Something newer than monograms.” He held them up for me to look at. “Isn’t that a beautiful bit of workmanship?” he asked. His face lit up as he pronounced this sentence. “Look at that coat. You can see every hair.” The artist, he explained, was an elderly Frenchman who, before the War, had done
all
the Kaiser’s dogs in miniature, an achievement Mr. Sheer never failed to linger over in the sales letters he dictated. How much this meant to Mr. Sheer I did not understand until I suggested one day that we should omit the part about the Kaiser from a follow-up I was writing. It was the only time he was ever angry with me. I saw then that it was not solely Monsieur Ravasse’s talents that made Mr. Sheer treat him, alone of his associates, with a subservient respect, made him pay him, take his scoldings, ask his advice. Unquestionably, Monsieur Ravasse’s work did excite Mr. Sheer’s admiration—every pair of cuff links, every brooch was for him a new miracle—but the greater miracle had, I am afraid, taken place inside Mr. Sheer’s head: he had succumbed to the spell of his own salesmanship, and Monsieur Ravasse had become interchangeable with the Kaiser in his mind.

At any rate, commercially speaking, Monsieur Ravasse was, virtually, our only asset, and it was these custom-made dog crystals that Mr. Sheer was pushing all that hot summer I worked for him. There was not a great margin of profit to be made on them, and many inconveniences attended their execution, but they were the only things we had that tempted the rich people, who, on Long Island, in New Jersey, in the Adirondacks, in Canada, were feeling themselves poor. In the letters I took from his dictation all our pieces were described as Extraordinary Bargains, Sacrifices, Exceptional Opportunities, Fine Investments Especially In These Times. But the rich people seldom believed. Mr. Sheer might insist that “an opportunity like this may never present itself again,” but only when a man’s own dog was concerned did the argument carry much weight. A seventeenth-century tapestry would still exist when times got better (if they ever did); one could afford to wait and pay a little more, if necessary. But one’s own dog might die, or the aging artist, who after all dated from Louis Napoleon, might die himself. So one might perhaps hurry, as Mr. Sheer urged, to-take-advantage-of-this-remarkable-offer.

During that summer we turned out several Bedlingtons, a cairn, two Kerry blues, some German sheep dogs, and even a chihuahua, which, being itself a miniature, proved, in Mr. Sheer’s opinion, the least interesting of all our subjects. There were also extensive negotiations with a lady who had thirty-one toy spaniels, but she and Mr. Sheer could never get together on the price (for she felt that the number of dogs entitled her to a cut rate), and the project was finally abandoned.

The dogs who came up from Long Island or New Jersey presented no particular problems. They arrived with their handlers, posed for a few hours, and then went home until the next day. Naturally, the miniature would have to be repainted at least once, for the owners never felt that their pets had been done justice, but this was a relatively simple matter. It was the dogs who were not within commuting distance that gave us trouble. Such a dog would arrive by Railway Express, boxed up in a cage and wild with hunger. Arrangements would have been made, of course, for it to be fed by the trainmen on the way, but, as far as we could tell, this was never done. We would take the cage into the inner office, open it, and the animal would shoot out and bite me on the leg. There was one cairn who came out like a black cannonball and was crazy ever after. The dogs were usually in such bad condition that extensive treatment by a veterinary was necessary before we could allow them to pose. The cairn was never able to pose at all. We kept him in the office for a long time, trying to soothe him back to sanity, but it was no use, and when he finally bit Mr. Sheer’s red-haired mistress, we sent him home to his owner, who threatened to sue us for what had happened.

Yet in spite of the havoc created by this business, the nervous strain and the expense, the smell and the smallness of the profit, there was nearly always a dog boarding in my office, eating the choicest dog meat while Mr. Sheer went without his lunch. As the summer wore on, the smell of the dogs mingled with the damp, sour odor of the old velvet drapes, with the colored boy’s personal smell, with the smell of Mr. Sheer’s two suits, which were stiff with dried sweat, until our very skins were soaked with the gallery, and even outside, on the streets, we walked about with a special, occupational scent.

We were not making money. In spite of the commissioned crystals we were not so much as breaking even. The second morning I came to work I was met by a square man with a badge who was putting a sign on the door. The sign read,
PUBLIC AUCTION TODAY.

I took out my key and said politely, “I didn’t know there was to be an auction.”

“Really?” said the man. “Maybe you want to pay this forty-three eighty-five then?” And he shoved a document at me.

“You mean,” I said, “it’s a debt?”

“Don’t kid me, sister,” said the man, “I’m the city marshal.”

I began to talk very rapidly, to say that I was sure Mr. Sheer didn’t know about this, that it must be an oversight, that he would be here any minute, that the marshal must wait till he came. But another man came up the hall and began to help him with the sign, and the city marshal’s only replies were derisive and they were addressed, not to me, but to his assistant, who found them very amusing. I went into my office, put my head on the typewriter, and started to cry.

At once the city marshal was bending over me, his hand on my shoulder.

“For God’s sake, sister, don’t cry,” he said. “What’s the trouble? This guy your sweetheart?”

“No,” I sobbed.

“He a relation of yours?”

“No.”

“Then for God’s sake what are you crying about?”

“Because I’m not accustomed to being spoken to in such a manner.”

He dropped his hand in amazement. Then he went out and took the sign down.

“You think this guy will pay up?”

“Yes.”

“All right. See that he has the money at my office at four o’clock sharp.”

The two of them went away, carrying the sign.

Mr. Sheer slipped in at noon with an apprehensive air. I expected him to share my indignation at the law’s highhandedness, but he seemed, rather, to take the city marshal’s attitude. He listened to my story with some astonishment, and then laughed in a relieved way, and shook my hand several times and said I was going to make a wonderful secretary.

“But you must pay the money right away,” I said.

“Yes,” he answered vaguely.

However, I nagged him about it until he made some phone calls, in the inner office, with the door closed. He then went out, and the city marshal never came again, so, presumably, the debt was paid.

In conversation Mr. Sheer frequently reverted to the city marshal’s visit. In his eyes, one could see, it marked a turning-point in his career. Obviously, as I recognized later, he had been expecting the city marshal and his sign, had tried in all quarters to raise the money and failed. That was why he had not come in until noon, for in the face of danger Mr. Sheer always disappeared. He had resigned himself to the loss of his business and the concomitant loss of prestige. He had seen himself condemned, cast back into the outer darkness from which he had risen, back into that nether world where a public auction or a bankruptcy or a jail term carried no stigma. He had already accepted his sentence when he discovered that he had been reprieved, as if by a miracle, at the eleventh hour. He had been given, as it were, a second chance, and with it came a second wind that enabled him to effect, easily, by a few telephone calls, what for weeks had been the impossible—the settlement of a debt of forty-three dollars and some odd cents. After this, Mr. Sheer’s hold on respectability was much more tenacious, for after this Mr. Sheer no longer believed that his clutching fingers
could
be shaken off.

However unappetizing, however eccentric his gallery might appear to the sophisticated world, to Mr. Sheer these rooms with their dark velvet, their porcelain urns, their statuary, their dirty chasubles hung from the ceiling, their little rococo chairs, and their deep, velvet-covered sofa incarnated a double dream. From his Western boyhood, he said, he had loved dogs and culture. There was a rich man back in San Francisco whose dogs he had valeted and whose lawn he had watered; now and then he had been allowed to look at this man’s fine library, which contained, he declared with reminiscent awe, “all these wonderful works on Shakespeare and vice versa.” Today, as at that time, the dog was the natural highway to culture, and Mr. Sheer perceived no incongruity between the tarnished luxury of his setting and the homeliness of his liveliest line of goods.