Corpus Christmas (4 page)

Officiously, Mrs. Beardsley opened a door concealed beneath the marble stairwell, passed along a short hall that led back
to what was left of the butler’s pantry, turned right, and descended the stairs to the basement.

* * *

An hour earlier, Rick Evans had followed Pascal Grant down those steps into the kitchen. It was enormous, but the stamped-tin
ceiling was surprisingly low and the room’s dry snugness made Rick think of
Wind in the Willows
and of Mr. Badger’s home and Mole’s cosy tunnels. Blue rag rugs were scattered over brown floor tiles, a massive cookstove
resplendent with nickel-plate ornamentation dominated the room, and one wall was lined with shallow open shelves that held
the blue willowware Sophie Breul had provided for her servants’ daily use.

Rick had wanted to open the doors of the huge chestnut ice box, to lift the lids of painted tin canisters and peer into the
built-in storage bins, but Pascal Grant had tugged at his sleeve.

“They’re all empty. Come and see my window before it gets dark, okay?”

As he trailed Pascal through the cavernous basement passages, Rick was reminded of explorations he used to take with his best
friend through abandoned barns and farmhouses back home in Louisiana’s bayou country. There was that same sense of sadness,
of human artifacts abandoned to their own devices.

On the other side of the scullery were empty coal bins, made redundant by an oil furnace that was itself in need of replacement.
Beyond the kitchen lay rooms no longer needed for their original purposes: cold closets with sharp hooks for hanging meat
and poultry, bins for food supplies, a laundry room, with deep stone sinks and tall drying racks. These were now lumbered
with bulky storage crates, trunks, rolled-up carpets, and odds and ends too good to throw away, yet no longer needed for the
day-to-day business of the museum. The hall wound past a room that held racks of pictures an earlier curator had weeded out
of the main collection as too hopelessly banal; another room stored the folding chairs that were brought up whenever the main
hall was used for lectures or recitals.

At the street end of the basement was a sturdy wooden service door that opened onto a shallow areaway beneath the grandeur
of the high marble stoop with its elaborate railings. Echoing the rounded door top was one of those whimsicalities to which
Victorians were so often given: a lacy wrought-iron spider web set into the upper third of the door, each interstice of the
web fitted with clear beveled glass. At the center of the web was a tiny brass garden spider which Pascal kept polished till
it shone like gold.

The window was uniquely decorative, yet city-smart as well. Callers could be identified without opening the door and the strong
iron cobweb was fine enough that no burglar could smash a tiny pane of glass and reach through to unbolt the latch. Rick had
no formal grounding in aesthetics but it occurred to him that Pascal’s sense of beauty might be more sophisticated than he’d
realized.

The young janitor was looking up at him through long golden lashes. “It’s my first favorite window,” he said shyly.

“It’s beautiful,” Rick told him. “I definitely want a picture of this.” He tilted the strobe on his camera to bounce light
off the ceiling and took a couple of experimental shots before switching lenses for a close-up of the spider.

As he worked, he began to consider the potentials the house offered.

“My grandfather wants me do a new brochure and perhaps some new souvenir postcards,” he said, “and Dr. Peake wants me to photograph
all the paintings, but I bet I could do a whole series of slides on just architectural details, another on furniture, perhaps
one on Victorian clothes or dishes.”

“
All
the paintings?” Pascal interrupted. “Dr. Peake said for you to take pictures of all of them?”

“Yeah, he said they’ve never done a photographic record of the whole collection.” Rick finished with the window and recapped
the lens.

“I’ve got some pictures in my room,” Pascal said proudly. “Dr. Peake said I could. Come see.”

He led Rick back down the passageway and through the kitchen. Beyond the service stairs was what had once been the downstairs
butler’s pantry, connected to the one above by a large dumbwaiter. This was where the Breul maids had put the finishing touches
on meals before sending them aloft. Now the space was outfitted for the only live-in help left. On the counter beside the
small sink was a new microwave oven, a coffee maker and a hot-air popcorn popper; below, a half-size refrigerator.

Although the kitchenette was for Pascal Grant’s use, it was open to the stairs and kitchen and to the casual inspection of
anyone passing through. Perhaps that was why it looked as impersonal as any laboratory, thought Rick.

As if he could read thoughts, Pascal paused before a closed door at the rear of the alcove and looked up at him with another
of those seraphic smiles. “Mrs. Beardsley says everything has to be neat out here.”

He opened the door and clicked on a wall switch. “I can do what I want to in here.”

The room was astonishing. Everywhere Rick looked he saw patterns upon figures upon designs—paisleys and florals beside stripes
and basketweave and geometrics. It was like a private retreat designed by some mad Victorian decorator and it should have
overwhelmed Rick’s visual senses; yet, the colors were so rich and dark that lamplight was soaked up until the whole room
coalesced into a mellow warmth that made him think again of a small anthropomorphic animal’s cosy den. A human hobbit hole.

Originally the servants’ sitting room, the ceiling and windowless walls were papered in a faded turkey red and the floor was
layered with odd-size throw rugs, all threadbare but of oriental design. A couple of shabby easy chairs stood on either side
of an open hearth that sported a handsome overmantel of carved walnut. For sleeping, Pascal had pushed a double bed mattress
and box springs up against a cluttered sideboard and covered it with embroidered shawls and thickly fringed pillows so that
it looked more like a Persian divan than a bed.

The lower doors of the sideboard had been folded open to store his clock radio, tape player, and stacks of tapes within easy
reach, while a nearby Moroccan brass coffee table held a miniature television.

Pascal unzipped his coverall and stepped out of it. Beneath, he wore jeans and a thin knitted jersey that molded every line
of his slender torso. He hung the coverall inside a tall wooden wardrobe and pulled on a blue Fair Isle sweater, a castoff
from one of Mrs. Beardsley’s sons that echoed his clear blue eyes. Smoothing his tousled golden hair, he looked up at Rick
happily.

“See my pictures?”

It was impossible not to since every wall was covered so closely that the red wallpaper beneath was almost hidden.

A large sentimental farmyard scene hung above the fireplace. It pictured baby ducks and chicks, rosy-cheeked children, and
other young animals and was doubtless meant to inspire wholesome thoughts among the servants.

But that was the only properly framed picture in the room and the only one that clearly belonged to the nineteenth century.
Everything else was thumbtacked to the walls and was vigorously modern: Kandinsky, Klee, Rothko, Pollock, Picasso, Dali, Ernst—all
the twentieth-century icons. None were smaller than twenty-four by thirty-six inches and, looking closer, Rick saw that they
all seemed to have begun as high-quality art posters. Some were so beautifully reproduced on such heavy stock that, with the
subdued lighting, he had to touch the surface of a Dali dreamscape to reassure himself that it wasn’t real.

“I cut off all that writing stuff,” said Pascal. “Writing stuff?” “Museum names and numbers and stuff like that,” the young
handyman explained earnestly. “I don’t read so good, but I know real pictures don’t have that stuff on the bottom, so I cut
it off.”

“Where did you find so many posters, though?” asked Rick, curious.

“Dr. Kimmelshue—he was here before Dr. Peake. He died. He had a bunch of them in his office and lots more down here.” He gestured
in the direction of the storage rooms. “Dr. Peake told me to throw them all out and I told him I could take them if he didn’t
want them so he said I could have anything there I wanted.”

Pascal paused and caught his short upper lip with his lower teeth. “Well, he didn’t mean
anything
I wanted. There’s some trunks with clothes and stuff. I didn’t take those. He just meant the pictures. And you can take pictures
of them, too.”

There was such innocent generosity in his voice that Rick hesitated, looking for tactful words. “They’re wonderful pictures,
Pascal, but I think Dr. Peake’s mainly interested in the real old stuff. Like that one over the fireplace. It’s a terrific
room, though, and you’ve fixed it up great.”

To change the subject, he walked around the bed, sat down on the edge, and began reading the titles on the other youth’s stack
of cassette tapes. “Hey, what kind of music do you like, Pasc?”

Happiness suffused Grant’s beautiful features. “Pasc. That’s what my friend called me, my friend at the training center. That’s
where I learned how to fix things. Are you going to be my friend?”

“Sure,” Rick said automatically. “I’ll get us some soda,” Pascal decided. He fetched two cans from the kitchenette, and upon
returning, stretched across the bed to hand one to his new friend.

Rick continued to read the titles of the tapes as he sipped from the can. “Basie, Lionel Hampton, Cootie Williams, Gene Krupa—you’re
really into classic jazz, aren’t you?”

Pascal Grant sat down on the other side of the bed and began pulling out his favorite tapes. “I like it,” he said simply.
“It makes me feel good. Like the pictures do. Sometimes they—they get all mixed up together sometimes, the jazz and the pictures.”

“You have Benny Goodman’s Carnegie Hall concert?” “‘Sing, Sing, Sing’!” Pascal exclaimed. “It’s on the player. That’s my very
first favorite.”

Balancing his soda, he pulled himself over the billowing cushions and punched buttons until Krupa’s hypnotic drums filled
the room.

“Hey, yeah!” breathed Rick. He pushed a couple of cushions into a stack and leaned back on them. Pascal did the same at the
opposite end of the bed so that they sprawled heel to head, facing each other as they drank and listened to the pounding intensity
of one of the greatest outpourings of spontaneous jazz ever recorded.

The music, the warmth, the rich reds and golds and purples of the room, the vibrant posters—Pasc was right, he thought, somehow
they
did
look like jazz would look if you could paint jazz themes—everything about this moment combined to make him feel safe and
unthreatened for the first time since coming to New York.

And there was Pasc himself, his angelic face in shadows, his tangled curls turned into a golden halo by the lamp behind him.
A rush of love and pity welled up inside of Rick.

Then, as Jess Stacy’s piano explored the outer reaches of the melody, he felt Pascal touch his shoe, heard his low voice say,
“I’m glad you’re going to be my friend, Rick,” and was wrenched by something deeper and terrifyingly primal.

Startled, he sat upright and saw Mrs. Beardsley’s disapproving face at the door.

“I knocked,” she said in a stern voice, “but the music’s so loud—”

Pascal Grant eeled across the end of the bed to lower the volume, then turned to smile at the woman. “I’m sorry, Mrs. Beardsley.
I was showing Rick my tapes. He’s going to be my friend.”

“That’s very nice, Pascal,” said Mrs. Beardsley, “but right now, I think Mr. Evans is expected upstairs.”

“Oh, gosh!” Rick groaned. Embarrassed and guilty, he left his soda on the sideboard and bolted past the stern-faced docent.

Benjamin Peak had, on his own initiative, called this special meeting to explore—informally, he assured them archly—various
ways of stemming the Erich Breul House’s rapidly growing deficit, and he was prepared to be gracious about Rick Evans’ tardy
entry for dear old Jacob’s sake.

Not that Jacob had turned into a doting grandfather. A respected dealer and now senior partner at Kohn and Munson Gallery,
Jacob Munson admitted to seventy although it was generally believed that he was much nearer eighty. His fierce, explosive
temper had been tamed somewhat since the death of his son several years earlier, but his devotion to art and to the business
of art remained strong, and his friendship had occasionally smoothed Peake’s progress in the art world.

Beside him sat Hester Kohn, daughter of his late partner, a trim and smartly dressed brunette of thirty-four, with quizzical
hazel eyes and a small mouth that smiled easily. She wore gray boots and slacks, a high-collared red silk shirt, and a wide
flat necklace of gold enameled in colorful Chinese chrysanthemums. She was addicted to gardenias and her heady perfume fought
Munson’s cloud of peppermint to a draw.

Munson had been apprehensive when young Hester Kohn inherited her father’s half interest in the gallery, but these past two
years had gone smoothly. She handled the financial side of the business as efficiently as her father had and seemed equally
content to leave final artistic judgments to him.

Jacob Munson considered himself less fortunate than Horace Kohn in his offspring. His only son, the son he’d groomed to come
into the gallery, the son who painted like an angel, had been killed in a plane crash before the lad was twenty-five. His
two older daughters, resentful because he’d never encouraged their participation until after the tragedy, resisted his tardy
attempts to interest them in art. One was now a doctor in Seattle, the other taught economics at a small college in Louisiana.
Although the doctor had remained willfully unmaternal, the professor had eventually managed one child, Richard.

Aware of his grandfather’s reservations, Rick Evans found himself a chair just inside the director’s door and now fiddled
with his camera lens.

He focused on Munson’s narrow foot, twisting the lens until his shoelaces came into sharp detail. Rick would have liked to
point his camera directly at Munson’s face but knew that would annoy. He wished that he pleased his grandfather better.