Tales for a Stormy Night (23 page)

Mary Gardner watched, rooted and muted, as men and women, visitors like herself, hastened past bearing framed pictures in their arms; and in one case two men carried between them a huge Chagall night scene in which the little creatures seemed to be jumping on and off the canvas, having an uproarious time in transit. A woman took the Rouault from the wall beside the Monet and hurried with it after the bearers of the Chagall.

Still Mary hesitated. That duty should compel her to touch where conscience had so long forbidden it—this conflict increased her confusion. Another thrust of smoke into the room made the issue plainly the picture’s survival, if not indeed her own. In desperate haste she tried to lift the Monet from the wall, but it would not yield.

She strove, pulling with her full strength—such strength that when the wire broke, she was catapulted backward and fell over the viewer’s bench, crashing her head into the painting. Since the canvas was mounted on board, the only misfortune—aside from her bruised head which mattered not at all—was that the picture had jarred loose from its frame. By then Mary cared little for the frame. She caught up the painting, hugged it to her, and groped her way to the gallery door.

She reached the smoke-bogged corridor at the instant the water pressure brought the hoses violently to life. Jets of water spurted from every connection. Mary shielded the picture with her body until she could edge it within the raincoat she had worn against the morning drizzle.

She hurried along the corridor, the last apparently of the volunteer rescuers. The guards were sealing off the wing of the building, closing the fire prevention door. They showed little patience with her protests, shunting her down the stairs. By the time she reached the lobby the police had cordoned off civilians. Imperious as well as impervious, a policeman escorted her into the crowd, and in the crowd, having no use of her arms—they were still locked around the picture—she was shoved and jostled toward the door and there pitilessly jettisoned into the street. On the sidewalk she had no hope at all of finding anyone in that surging, gaping mob on whom she could safely bestow her art treasure.

People screamed and shouted that they could see the flames. Mary did not look back. She hastened homeward, walking proud and fierce, thinking that the city was after all a jungle. She hugged the picture to her, her raincoat its only shield but her life a ready forfeit for its safety.

It has been in her mind to telephone the Institute office at once. But in her own apartment, the painting propped up against cushions on the sofa, she reasoned that until the fire was extinguished she had no hope of talking with anyone there. She called her own office and pleaded a sudden illness—something she had eaten at lunch though she had not had a bite since breakfast.

The walls of her apartment were hung with what she called her “potpourri”: costume prints and color lithographs—all, she had been proud to say, limited editions or artists’ prints. She had sometimes thought of buying paintings, but plainly she could not afford her own tastes. On impulse now, she took down an Italian lithograph and removed the glass and mat from the wooden frame. The Monet fit quite well. And to her particular delight she could now hang it right side up. As though with a will of its own, the painting claimed the place on her wall most favored by the light of day.

There is no way of describing Mary’s pleasure in the company she kept that afternoon. She would not have taken her eyes from the picture at all except for the joy that was renewed at each returning. Reluctantly she turned on the radio at five o’clock so that she might learn more of the fire at the Institute. It had been extensive and destructive—an entire wing of the building was gutted.

She listened with the remote and somewhat smug solicitude that one bestows on other people’s tragedies to the enumeration of the paintings which had been destroyed. The mention of “Trees Near Le Havre” startled her. A full moment later she realized the explicit meaning of the announcer’s words. She turned off the radio and sat a long time in the flood of silence.

Then she said aloud tentatively, “You are a thief, Mary Gardner,” and after a bit repeated, “Oh, yes. You are a thief.” But she did not mind at all. Nothing so portentous had ever been said about her before, even by herself.

She ate her dinner from a tray before the painting, having with it a bottle of French wine. Many times that night she went from her bed to the living-room door until she seemed to have slept between so many wakenings. At last she did sleep.

But the first light of morning fell on Mary’s conscience as early as upon the painting. After one brief visit to the living room she made her plans with the care of a religious novice well aware of the devil’s constancy. She dressed more severely than was her fashion, needing herringbone for backbone—the ridiculous phrase kept running through her mind at breakfast. In final appraisal of herself in the hall mirror she thought she looked like the headmistress of an English girls’ school, which she supposed satisfactory to the task before her.

Just before she left the apartment, she spent one last moment alone with the Monet. Afterward, wherever, however the Institute chose to hang it, she might hope to feel that a little part of it was forever hers.

On the street she bought a newspaper and confirmed the listing of “Trees Near Le Havre.” Although that wing of the Institute had been destroyed, many of its paintings had been carried to safety by way of the second-floor corridor.

Part of the street in front of the Institute was still cordoned off when she reached it, congesting the flow of morning traffic. The police on duty were no less brusque than those whom Mary had encountered the day before. She was seized by the impulse to postpone her mission—an almost irresistible temptation, especially when she was barred from entering the museum unless she could show a pass such as had been issued to all authorized personnel.

“Of course I’m not authorized.” she exclaimed. “If I were I shouldn’t be out here.”

The policeman directed her to the sergeant in charge. He was at the moment disputing with the fire insurance representative how much of the street could be used for the salvage operation. “The business of this street is business,” the sergeant said, “and that’s my business.”

Mary waited until the insurance man stalked into the building. He did not need a pass, she noticed. “Excuse me, officer, I have a painting—”

“Lady…” He drew the long breath of patience. “Yes, ma’am?”

“Yesterday during the fire a painting was supposedly destroyed—a lovely, small Monet called—”

“Was there now?” the sergeant interrupted. Lovely small Monets really touched him.

Mary was becoming flustered in spite of herself. “It’s listed in this morning’s paper as having been destroyed. But it wasn’t. I have it at home.”

The policeman looked at her for the first time with a certain compassion. “On your living-room wall, no doubt,” he said with deep knowingness.

“Yes, as a matter of fact.”

He took her gently but firmly by the arm. “I tell you what you do. You go along to police headquarters on Fifty-seventh Street. You know where that is, don’t you? Just tell them all about it like a good girl.” He propelled her into the crowd and there released her. Then he raised his voice: “Keep moving! You’ll see it all on the television.”

Mary had no intention of going to police headquarters where, she presumed, men concerned with armed robbery, mayhem, and worse were even less likely to understand the subtlety of her problem. She went to her office and throughout the morning tried periodically to reach the museum curator’s office by telephone. On each of her calls either the switchboard was tied up or his line was busy for longer than she could wait.

Finally she hit on the idea of asking for the Institute’s Public Relations Department, and to someone there, obviously distracted—Mary could hear parts of three conversations going on at the same time—she explained how during the fire she had saved Monet’s “Trees Near Le Havre.”

“Near where, madam?” the voice asked.

“Le Havre.” Mary spelled it. “By Monet,” she added:

“Is that two words or one?” the voice asked.

“Please transfer me to the curator’s office,” Mary said and ran her fingers up and down the lapel of her herringbone suit.

Mary thought it a wise precaution to meet the Institute’s representative in the apartment lobby where she first asked to see his credentials. He identified himself as the man to whom she had given her name and address on the phone. Mary signaled for the elevator and thought about his identification: Robert Attlebury III. She had seen his name on the museum roster: Curator of…she could not remember.

He looked every inch the curator, standing erect and remote while the elevator bore them slowly upward. A curator perhaps, but she would not have called him a connoisseur. One with his face and disposition would always taste and spit out, she thought. She could imagine his scorn of things he found distasteful, and instinctively she knew herself to be distasteful to him.

Not that it really mattered what he felt about her. She was nobody. But how must the young unknown artist feel standing with his work before such superciliousness? Or had he a different mien and manner for people of his own kind? In that case she would have given a great deal for the commonest of courtesies.

“Everything seems so extraordinary—in retrospect,” Mary said to brook the silence of their seemingly endless ascent.

“How fortunate for you,” he said, and Mary thought, perhaps it was.

When they reached the door of her apartment, she paused before turning the key. “Shouldn’t you have brought a guard—or someone?”

He looked down on her as from Olympus. “I am someone.”

Mary resolved to say nothing more. She opened the door and left it open. He preceded her and moved across the foyer into the living room and stood before the Monet. His rude directness oddly comforted her: he did, after all, care about painting. She ought not to judge men, she thought, from her limited experience of them.

He gazed at the Monet for a few moments, then he tilted his head ever so slightly from one side to the other. Mary’s heart began to beat erratically. For months she had wanted to discuss with someone who really knew about such things her theory of what was reflection and what was reality in “Trees Near Le Havre.” But now that her chance was at hand she could not find the words.

Still, she had to say something—something…casual. “The frame is mine,” she said, “but for the picture’s protection you may take it. I can get it the next time I’m at the museum.”

Surprisingly, he laughed. “It may be the better part at that,” he said.

“I beg your pardon?”

He actually looked at her. “Your story is ingenious, madam, but then it was warranted by the occasion.”

“I simply do not understand what you are saying,” Mary said.

“I have seen better copies than this one,” he said. “It’s too bad your ingenuity isn’t matched by a better imitation.”

Mary was too stunned to speak. He was about to go. “But…it’s signed,” Mary blurted out, and feebly tried to direct his attention to the name in the upper corner.

“Which makes it forgery, doesn’t it?” he said almost solicitously.

His preciseness, his imperturbability in the light of the horrendous thing he was saying, etched detail into the nightmare.

“That’s not my problem!” Mary cried, giving voice to words she did not mean, saying what amounted to a betrayal of the painting she so loved.

“Oh, but it is. Indeed it is, and I may say a serious problem if I were to pursue it.”

“Please do pursue it!” Mary cried.

Again he smiled, just a little. “That is not the Institute’s way of dealing with these things.”

“You do not
like
Monet,” Mary challenged desperately, for he had started toward the door.

“That’s rather beside the point, isn’t it?”

“You don’t
know
Monet. You can’t! Not possibly!”

“How could I dislike him if I didn’t know him? Let me tell you something about Monet.” He turned back to the picture and trailed a finger over one vivid area. “In Monet the purple is everything.”

“The purple?” Mary said.

“You’re beginning to see it yourself now, aren’t you?” His tone verged on the pedagogic.

Mary closed her eyes and said, “I only know how this painting came to be here.”

“I infinitely prefer not to be made your confidant in that matter,” he said. “Now I have rather more important matters to take care of.” And again he started toward the door.

Mary hastened to block his escape. “It doesn’t matter what you think of Monet, or of me, or of anything. You’ve got to take that painting back to the museum.”

“And be made a laughingstock when the hoax is discovered?” He set an arm as stiff as a brass rail between them and moved out of the apartment.

Mary followed him to the elevator, now quite beside herself. “I shall go to the newspapers!” she cried.

“I think you might regret it.”

“Now I know, I understand!” Mary saw the elevator door open. “You were glad to think the Monet had been destroyed in the fire.”

“Savage!” he said.

Then the door closed between them.

In time Mary persuaded—and it wasn’t easy—certain experts, even an art critic, to come and examine “her” Monet. It was a more expensive undertaking than she could afford—all of them seemed to expect refreshments, including expensive liquors. Her friends fell in with “Mary’s hoax,” as they came to call her story, and she was much admired in an ever-widening and increasingly esoteric circle for her unwavering account of how she had come into possession of a “genuine Monet.” Despite the virtue of simplicity, a trait since childhood, she found herself using words in symbolic combinations—the language of the company she now kept—and people far wiser than she would say of her: “How perceptive!” or “What insight!”—and then pour themselves another drink.

One day her employer, the great man himself, who prior to her “acquisition” had not known whether she lived in propriety or in sin, arrived at her cocktail time bringing with him a famous art historian.