Binocular Vision: New & Selected Stories (50 page)

But she knew all that. She had memorized ethical principles the way she might have memorized the rules for rolling out pastry—stuff she would recite but never practice. And he would not rebuke her. Loyalty was what counted most; he’d told her that, or meant to.

“Aren’t you going to say anything?” she said, hands on hips.

“Thank you,” he managed.

H
E HUNG THE PAINTING
, the following Tuesday—it had taken him that long to decide where. He’d thought first of hanging it in the bedroom—no one else went in there except the cleaning woman. He thought of his small study: roses on the carpet, lilies on the wallpaper, books, a flame-stitch armchair, and cockatooed draperies almost concealing the single narrow window. He considered the kitchen and the bathroom and the communal hall between his apartment and hers; he considered the back stairway, whose steps wore rubber treads. He considered his clothes closet.

In the end he hung it in the living room, over the fireplace. The portrait of his great-grandfather (attorney general of the commonwealth, 1875–1880) was relegated to the bedroom, replacing the mirror, which itself went into the back of the clothes closet, appearing to double his thrifty wardrobe.

His great-grandfather, bearded, one hand resting on the laws of the commonwealth, had thrown his noble gaze across the room at the early map of Massachusetts. Portrait and map had provided an axis of honor. The Vuillard corrupted the room.

“Attractive,” said a former colleague who’d come over for some advice. “New?”

“Relocated,” Francis said, holding his breath. The conversation turned to the present governor, such a dimwit.

“Oooh, Mr. Morrison,” said the cleaning woman.

“Nice,” said the man who came to fix a leak in the bathtub, but he seemed to be referring to the apartment in general.

Louanne’s glasses glinted at the painting on her first few visits after the bestowal; then they didn’t. She was writing a paper on the Electoral College. Discussions of that valuable, antiquated procedure occupied their sessions. At the Zerubins’ they talked about dogs and baseball.

Nowhere could he find news of the theft. The painting had probably been stolen to begin with. He could not identify it in the catalogue raisonné; even under the heading “Privately Held” he could not find
Mme Vuillard with Flowers
or anything like it
.
Still, its most recent possessor must have noted its absence by now. Perhaps the Russian mafia was making confident plans to kill him.

Louanne was still teaching those dirty lawyers. “And the one in the grand house, if he should mention that he’s been robbed?” asked Francis.

“He hasn’t mentioned.”

“If he does?”

“In which language?”

“Oh … English.”

“I’ll say: ‘Speak Russian.’

” “In Russian, then.”

“I’ll look sympathetic.” To demonstrate, she slanted her head and pursed the corners of her mouth, an executioner checking the knot on a noose.

He loved the gift she had given him. As time passed he did not love it less. Nor did he get used to it: the woman’s head so close that her voice could almost be heard; the economy of line and the limited palette; the slight distortion of the angle of the head; the lack of a grand idea. The humble daisies. A humble artist: secondary even in his heyday.

“Our constitution is more specific than yours, because we do not rely on the judiciary,” she was saying one Wednesday. “Judges were considered an extension of the Little Father, and—”

“Yes,” Francis said, though he was not certain of the accuracy of her statement. “Louanne, my dear, we must relinquish the painting.”

Her glasses stared at him.

“I cherish it,” he went on. “But it is too much for me. I will die of it.”

“You will die of a heart attack. Isn’t that why you take that powdered stuff?”

“The Cystadane is to
prevent
my dying.”

“To delay it. Anyway, no one ever died from beauty.”

“Then I will be the first.”

Silence while she surveyed him. It occurred to him, not for the first time, that her spectacles probably reduced what was before them. “I’ve still got the big brown bag,” she admitted. “But I’ve been teaching those crooks at their office lately. I don’t know when I’ll be at the house again.”

“We cannot return it to them, Louanne. It demands a public place. A shared arena, a location where any person, moneyed or penniless, cultured or gross, passionate or indifferent, can benefit from its—”

“Mr. Francis?”

He halted. With effortful simplicity he said: “It belongs at the museum.”

“Oh. So donate it.”

“Well, no, not with its murky provenance.” He did not want her deported. “We must slip it in.”

“Like a bomb?”

“Like a bomb.”

“My great-great-uncle threw a bomb. They shot him for it. Asshole.”

She was referring to her relative, he hoped.

“G
OOD MORNING
, N
ICK
.”

“Mr. Morrison, good morning,” the guard said. “Good to see you. Ah … the young lady will have to check her parcel.”

He had hoped for exactly this: that the Big Brown Bag would prove a distraction, that his familiar backpack, rarely challenged, would not be challenged now, though it wasn’t the familiar one after all. It was new, considerably bigger, still fairly flat though.

“The young lady is well known to me; she’s carrying her art supplies,” Francis said. “Show him, Louanne.” And Louanne, feigning resentment, pulled out one by one a sketch pad, a sketch board, and pencils bound in their middle by a rubber band, fanning in both directions just as Vuillard’s daisies fanned upward from the mouth of the vase and their stalks downward into the expertly rendered water. Louanne then turned the bag upside down. A paper clip fell onto the floor.

“She’s going to copy a Rembrandt,” Francis confided. “Drawing a painting, it trains the hand.” The guard had to turn his attention to the visitor behind them. Louanne scraped up her tools.

They trotted upstairs to the Rembrandts. Louanne put some lines on paper. Then they trotted downstairs again, to the members’ lounge. From there they went to the trustees’ rooms and from there slipped down an out-of-the-way staircase to the basement and then farther, to the basement of the basement. There stood a dozen lockers, a few closed and padlocked, the rest ajar.

She helped him off with his backpack as if it were an overcoat and she a maid, a maid in a blue denim shirtwaist. He’d never before seen her in a dress. Francis unzipped the pack. Louanne withdrew the item without removing its bubble wrap. Francis slid it gently into a locker and closed the door.

Louanne took a padlock from her pocket, slipped it through matched metal loops, snapped it shut. She offered him the key on her palm. He shook his head. Her fingers closed over it.

Later, he figured, she’d swallow the key. She’d probably been practicing the maneuver. No matter: the painting would escape from captivity, in ten years or maybe fifteen—whenever a committee of janitors determined that the locker was abandoned. The padlock would be forced open, the locker’s secret brought to the director. A mild excitement would flutter the art world. Somebody would judge the painting authentic; somebody else would declare it an anonymous donation; the curious manner of its donation would be remarked. It would be hung on the wall of a numbered room. But first it would be displayed in an exhibition of recent acquisitions. He’d mail her an invitation and a round-trip plane ticket.

Following the girl up one stairway and the next, stopping for breath on each skimpy landing, he acknowledged to himself that Louanne might by then have vanished into a dark corner of Moscow, he into the blinding fluorescence of a nursing home. “
Ars longa
,” he muttered.

She turned her head. “Just a few more steps,” she assured him.

February 5

Dear Ms. Jenkins,

Josephine Salter has informed me that Caldicott Academy will not grant an extension for her Jan Term paper until you receive a request from me. Consider this that request. Of course Josephine could not meet the deadline; there was an upheaval in her family due to her stepmother’s unexpected return on January 31 after a two-month absence. You probably know, too, as does most of the town, that her father greeted his wife’s homecoming by throwing crockery at the wall and pouring Scotch into the family’s aged computer. Josie and young Oliver, whom the family calls Tollie, were more welcoming.

Let me say, for whatever it’s worth, that Josie was an asset to Forget Me Not during January—the customers miss her respectful presence and I miss her height. Standing on only a telephone book she could reach bibelots from my highest shelf. She seems to have learned something about antiques, too. Nevertheless, I continue to think that Jan Term is Caldicott Academy’s devious method of giving teachers an extra month’s paid vacation and in the process driving parents frantic with worry. The fifteen-year-old girls who volunteer at shelters, veterinary establishments, ethnic restaurants, and Central American villages are at risk for TB, psittacosis, salmonella, seduction, kidnapping, and deep boredom. Josie, working at my store, at least avoided the first five.

How are you, Eleanor? I’ve got an Edwardian inkwell you might want to take a look at.

February 15

Dear Ms. Jenkins,

Thank you for granting me an extension for my Jan Term paper. I didn’t need as much time as I first thought. Per your suggestion, I had kept daily notes on three-by-five cards, and as you predicted, it was not onerous to, after reading over the cards several times and arranging and rearranging them as if playing FreeCell
*
and thinking about them deeply, make an outline. (The preceding sentence demonstrates why you should not split an infinitive, so I left it in rather than correct it in case you need a reality example for the tenth-grade grammar unit.) My outline followed the helpful schema you provided: Why I Chose, What I Did, Some Things I Learned. After constructing the outline, writing the essay was pretty straightforward. I made the required three drafts on three successive days, starting on the morning my father gave me a typewriter (our computer had met with an accident). I found footnotes useful and deployed them according to
The Chicago Manual of Style,
numbering sequentially.

And so here is my paper, which I dedicate to my late mother. As you may know, though it was before your time, she too attended Caldicott Academy. She often shared with me her school-day memories, though she called them flashbacks. LOL.

*
Similar to Solitaire

My original plan for a Jan Term project was to read to the blind. I’m told that I have a pleasing voice. Before she died of a tumor
¹
my mother lost her vision, and so I read to her every afternoon just as she had read to me when I was little, mostly
Grimm’s Fairy Tales,
our favorite book. But readers to the blind are sent all over the Boston area, hither and yon, and I needed a workplace close to my stepbrother Tollie’s day care center, since his own mother was not at home at the time and therefore I was in charge of him and also of our household, which numbered three. So I applied to Forget Me Not, a nearby antique shop, because you can learn a lot of history from the artifacts of the past. Ms. Renata McLintock, owner and proprietor, warned me that what I would learn mostly was cleaning and a steady hand in pouring liquids, and she hoped that my progressive, prolapsed
²
school had taught me how to compute the 5 percent Massachusetts sales tax and that I would remember to do so.
³

In this paper I will refer to Ms. McLintock as “Rennie,” since she asked me to call her that. She doesn’t know where her mother dug up Renata.
⁴
Rennie was right about what I would mainly do. I vacuumed the floor and the furniture (I did that at home in January, too) and I scrubbed the little bathroom in back and then dumped the contents of the pail into the window boxes, for which I was responsible.
⁵
I climbed a ladder and polished the brass chandelier which dates from 1775 or thereabouts. It has been wired and fitted with 60-watt bulbs.

Those were my computational and cleaning duties. Some were daily and some were weekly. Also I assisted Rennie at hostessing tasks. Forget Me Not is like the village well of colonial times, a period we studied last year. At the village well, news and gossip and advice were exchanged. Women went away from it with water and also with strength and self-esteem, though some did find pleasure in making others feel wrong or stupid. But of this unpleasant type there were only a few at Forget Me Not. I will mention a particular person later. Also we have many customers who come in just to chat and don’t buy anything. Some want a smattering of comfort, like the one whose daughter had gotten rolled over by Princeton,
⁶
and others want a lot of solace, like the woman whose son had just died.
⁷
I became able to tell the difference between the two and to make tea for the first type and for the second type to pour sherry without spilling any.