Harmony In Flesh and Black (7 page)

If nothing was beautiful, nothing could be funny, either, and it was hard to be alive. Fred had needed a reason not to finish a brief life curled on a grate, a parasite and predator. He wanted beauty other than the functional perfection of a killing tool, and a quest whose object was not extinction or betrayal.

As time went on, Fred's instincts, his education and life experience, and his talents proved to complement Clay's, and his role shifted accordingly, though it was never defined. When he could, he enjoyed losing himself in research. The fact that he worked with paper and images, and that the people involved tended to be long gone, added a spice of history to the work.

The chase after La Belle Conchita had been fun. Fred, working hard, had followed her into a dark alley and left her there after fruitless attempts to find where she had gone next. He'd lost her trail in Baltimore, in 1895.

La Belle Conchita, known to her less intimate acquaintances as Conchita Hill, had caught their eyes first as one of the few American women painters whose work was accepted for exhibition at the annual Salon in Paris.

They had been amused and intrigued by her name. Clayton was further interested by the titles of her pictures, which suggested that she had been painting in Giverny at around the same time Monet was doing his haystacks.

Conchita Hill had been born on a ship off the coast of Brazil in 1865, the daughter of an American sea captain whose wife lived on board, as was not uncommon in those days. Hill's name appeared on the roster of the Art Students League in New York in the early 1880s. By the time she arrived in Paris, she was traveling with her mother, like three quarters of the Americans then studying art in that city.

Conchita seemed, from the brief references available in the writings of her colleagues, not to have distinguished herself for demureness. Fred was convinced that this was the very girl he discovered dancing at the Moulin de la Galette, in randy dishabille, in an 1893 lithograph by Toulouse-Lautrec entitled
La Belle Conchita.

Whether or not this was she, they believed that the subject of their search had had extensive acquaintance among artists who were of interest to them. Practically every painter of consequence, American or European, had been in Paris at some point during the 1880s, and the papers of several referred to Miss Hill or to Conchita. Often the references suggested that she was having a very good time. There couldn't have been many Conchitas.

Clayton was determined to discover what had become of her paintings; nothing by her had ever surfaced on the market. To find her paintings, they first had to discover what had become of her. There was no record of a permanent alliance: no marriage; no later exhibition of paintings by a Conchita anything, née Hill; no siblings; no city, even, that either parent might have come from and she might have returned to. She sailed from Le Havre on a ship bound for Baltimore that docked in October of 1895, and there she disappeared.

Fred had worked hard on her story and recalled it easily while looking out at Cambridge. He'd seen her now; that was flesh to attach to her story, and to another, Smykal's.

The city was moving slowly as the rain lifted. Buses geared up and droned. Dogs walked their masters and mistresses. Children dressed for soccer converged on the parks. At this moment Sam was playing baseball in Arlington, and Fred was missing the game.

Who was the author of the picture Clay had bought? Fred's lucky hit of the morning made him itch to establish the painter's identity. And thinking about it would distract him from the loud noise he was waiting for on Turbridge Street.

Fred found a meter open in front of a place on the other side of the square from Turbridge Street, and he went in and drank coffee, running through his mind the names of artists who could have been close enough to Conchita to record her in her skin.

Such things were not the same in 1890 as they are now, not even in gay Paree. There was as much of a social gulf between artists and models as there was between artists and peasants or, for that matter, between peasants and professional models. The peasants would not take off their clothes except for two or three occasions in their lifetimes: birth, marriage, death. In Paris, models who undressed, either for students or for artists, were inclined to be not French but Italian immigrants. Some French city girls who had no expectations were also willing to work hard and preferred modeling to the more dangerous other option available.

Students and friends did not then, as they do now, model for each other, unless clothed. For all that the human nude was exhibited as frankly and commonly as cows and chickens, only the rare American young lady would have had the presence and aplomb to serve as the original for the painting Clayton had purchased. But from the little they'd been able to learn about her, it seemed Conchita had been a jolly, open-minded girl, quite willing to test social frontiers.

Seven or eight names roved in Fred's mind as he finished the coffee and tossed the crumpled cup in the basket next to the door as he walked out. He realized while he was thinking that he had been lowering his head unconsciously to look into the mirror he remembered behind the reflected hip of Conchita Hill, trying to see the rest of the man whose legs showed in the glass.

They had, those legs, the look of Robert Louis Stevenson's, skinny, in their dark trousers, striding, in Sargent's Calcot paintings. No, Calcot was 1887—the Stevenson portraits were 1885, at Broadway. But Molly was right: the painting was too tender for Sargent.

*   *   *

Fred took himself through Harvard Yard, the campus busy now with students, and to the Fogg Museum's new addition on Prescott Street, where Harvard University keeps its fine-arts library. He had a bone between his teeth, time to kill, and an itch in the back of his mind to keep at bay. It was time to do some searching in the stacks.

Harvard, encouraged by its development office, counts as alumni all those who have ever been enrolled, however briefly or disastrously. So Fred had an alumnus card for the library. The stacks are underground, at the foot of a perilous staircase. This being the end of the school year, Fred expected to find students gnashing their teeth over lost footnotes, but the place was almost deserted.

The stacks are concentrated in a single room around whose sides hunch the desks, or carrels, that graduate students are assigned. Only three or four of these were occupied. A florid young woman in a blue print dress was leaning back in her chair, her feet up on her desk, a large volume on ancient Near Eastern pottery on her lap, and she herself as fast asleep as if she were enjoying a curse brought down upon her as a result of breaking into the wrong tomb.

A few of her fellows searched the stacks. Way down at the far end, near the cage where sales catalogs and precious and/or dirty art books are kept locked, a young man in jeans, white shirt, and bow tie sat at his desk in a puddle of lamp light, looking down at a book and then up, as if he were a bird swallowing water, then down again, to scribble on a yellow pad. He had a suitably frantic air for this time of year. He seemed almost to tear at his long blond hair.

American painting is in the middle of the stacks. Fred's plan was, if he could, to deliver himself to the same random forces that had worked so well already that morning, another form of research, sometimes the most successful, being serendipity.

He walked along the stacks, smelling the slow decay of leather, paper, glue, and cloth and looking for the trunk and head, and the fine hand, that would complete the male legs in the canvas mirror: the artist striding toward Conchita Hill, whose smile was greeting him. Paul Wayland Bartlett? Not too exciting. Frederick Arthur Bridgeman might have done it, but he would have stuck in something Moorish—perhaps a harem motif to give him an excuse for the nudity. Chase? There wasn't much on him in the stacks. There was Frank Duveneck (who would have wished to keep such a liaison secret from poor, ailing Elizabeth Boott), but Fred had dismissed him the night before. Lucy Lee-Robbins, now. Suppose the artist was also a woman. Lee-Robbins had a murky story and a body of paintings that was well hidden. She had painted well-realized—even fondled—female nudes who looked as if they were about to have tea. Lucy became the mistress of her teacher Emile-Auguste Carolus-Duran, who was also Sargent's teacher. The American manner of Clay's painting, after all, had its origin in French fashion well established by Carolus-Duran, which Sargent, being trickier than anyone, could rub French noses in, going them one better.

How about Charles Sprague Pearce? If the picture was by Pearce, it would be better off anonymous. Nobody wanted a Pearce. Sargent Fred had already written off. Molly was right about Sargent. He was a drapery man. Whistler?

Well, what about Whistler? Fred's heart did a little thump. The fan was right. The colors. Whistler could have executed such an image and called it
Harmony in Flesh and Black.
Lord knew Whistler could draw a woman when he wanted to.

But Whistler liked in his finished paintings to brag, Anyone else, to accomplish all I have done, would have been obliged to invest five times as much paint. The picture of La Belle Conchita, by contrast, had been done with delicious abandon, luxuriance, almost profligacy, in the use of material.

Still, it made a tempting story to go beside the one about Whistler's mistress Jo, whom Whistler, in a gesture of fraternal comradeship, had delivered over to Courbet as a model. Also, Fred loved the title
Harmony in Flesh and Black,
so nearly right for a Whistler.

But no, it wouldn't work with Whistler as the painter. The props were right, but not the manner. Fred had come to the end of the alphabet. He looked at his watch. He had been over two hours. The young lady with the interest in pottery was still sleeping soundly. The little fellow with the bow tie had disappeared.

Who, during the time in question, the 1880s, was exhibiting nudes that looked like the one Clayton had bought?

That question took Fred to the illustrated catalogs of Salon exhibitions.

*   *   *

Fred called Clayton from the pay phone upstairs. Clay was on the point of leaving for Doolan's, intending to collect Albert Finn on the way.

“Amusing,” Clay said, “to think how we will tiptoe past each other, conversing and exchanging wisdom while I attempt to look at the Heade without showing interest and he tries not to be noticed noticing my pointed lack of interest.

“Then there's the Gardner. Finn must be watched there. You don't think you and Molly could do me a tremendous favor and come after all? Your lady Molly can get anything she wants out of anybody, so we could aim her at Albert Finn.”

Fred told Clay to forget it.

“I suppose there are limits,” Clay said.

*   *   *

Fred left the library and walked past Turbridge Street, along Harvard, looking down at its usual quiet.

Not reporting the ugly fact of Smykal's murdered body had been a crime. But reporting the thing on the floor was not going to make Smykal any less dead. Fred could go in again now, have a more careful look, and then report the body—take some initiative to shake things loose.

But no. Turbridge Street was a trap, nothing to mess with. He'd let that work according to its own logic. It took discipline to put the scent of murder, and its retinal impact, firmly enough to the side to determine the best course to follow. He had a life to lead with Molly and her children, and he would give a great deal to keep it free from the random, searching stain of death by violence.

*   *   *

Fred drove back to Arlington. Some of Saturday was left. Despite the pitfall waiting on Turbridge Street, the afternoon had cleared enough for baseball. Fred caught Terry as she was leaving for her Little League game. She looked pretty, with her thin brown hair matted and raspberry jam on the shirt of her orange uniform. On the days when she worked, Molly had to rely on the kids to fend for themselves and remember what their appointments were.

“Wait a minute. Put your bike away, and I'll go with you,” Fred said.

An afternoon of idyllic, nonessential conflict would be a good thing. He could watch Terry pitch—she was really quite good—and at the same time be well away from anywhere he was expected. They put Terry's bike in the garage, and Fred drove her to the park and sat among the moms and dads watching the game get started.

Fred would lie low this afternoon and tonight, while Clay was hobnobbing with his cohorts at the Gardner. Depending on how soon Smykal rose to the surface, he might even wait until Monday to talk with Clay again.

Why shouldn't Fred enjoy some aspect of a simple life? Why shouldn't he quietly watch Terry play baseball? Afterward he would drive her home and take the family out for Chinese. Later he and Molly might see what developed.

Sitting in the chilly sunlight, enjoying the children's struggle with the game, Fred was amazed, almost alarmed, at what his life, at this moment, looked like. He resembled someone with a wife and kids.

As he watched the game, he felt anger blossoming that he knew had been seeded as soon as he looked down on that sordid, murdered thing on Turbridge Street. It had no right to spoil his chances. It had no right to threaten to cast its cloud—Fred's cloud—over the little family where he was finding a civilian purpose.

He wouldn't stand for it. And why should Molly?

In Molly's company things could be funny. Unless Fred ruined it.

That was a kind of beauty, funny. Like the children.

Fred saw Terry's team suffer a beautiful and ignominious defeat. He bought her an ice cream and comforted her for her skill and heroism, and they arrived home as the cold rain of evening started again. Molly met them at the door, dressed in a damp towel, moving fast.

“You shit,” she told Fred. “You didn't leave a message where you were. I've been on the phone to Clayton. You never told me he gave us tickets to the party at the Gardner. I had to stop on my way home to have my hair cut. I ordered pizza for the children. Can you pick it up while I dress? I don't know what you're going to wear.”