After Dachau (22 page)

People can simply never get used to everything that a corpse can do.

TWO MONTHS AND
ten days later, the following story appeared in the
New York Daily Globe
.

Normally unflappable New Yorkers were audibly and visibly flapped at the black-tie, invitation-only grand opening of a bizarre gallery-bookstore that is the brainchild of dark-horse socialite Jason Tull, Jr.

On Friday night, more than 200 guests from the city’s beau monde gathered at the Croatan gallery on Broadway at Madison Square to examine a collection of art and literature allegedly unseen in 2000 years.

It was the opinion of more than one visitor that the collection should remain unseen for another 2000.

Especially featured was an exhibit of the work of Negro photographer Roy DeCarava, a collection of dark and often enigmatic images of New York City in the decade or so following the victory at Dachau. Many of his pictures invite the philistine to wonder why they were taken in the first place. One must spend a few minutes in intimate communion with a picture like “Girl Looking Back” before its mysterious gravitic attraction begins to take effect, but “Two Women with Mannequin’s Hand” remained mute for me no matter how often I returned to it. “Couple at the Museum of Modern Art” was amusingly relevant in this setting, since the couple in question are planted in front of three examples of exactly the sort of art Croatan supposedly exists to rescue from oblivion—ugly smudges that might have come up directly from a heavily traveled industrial roadway.

Less appealing than DeCarava’s work were lithographs from four other artists of the period, all typical of the degenerate styles nurtured by the Jewish dealers and critics who so decisively shaped the “modern art” phenomenon. Three paintings in the same vein from a contemporary artist, Mallory Hastings, are also on view. According to the painter (who is coincidentally affianced to gallery-owner Tull), these three large works represent a style known briefly in the postwar years as “abstract expressionism.” Very expressive and very abstract, they invite the philistine to wonder if his four-year-old could do as well, given a sufficient supply of fingerpaints.

Owner Tull explains both the name and the concept of the gallery this way. At the end of the 17th century 100 of the earliest English settlers in the New World came to be known as “the Lost Colony” when they inexplicably vanished from Roanoke Island, leaving behind a single enigmatic trace: the word “Croatan,” carved in a tree trunk.
Since the artists Tull intends to showcase constitute a similarly “lost” colony composed of many mongrel races, now long extinct, the name Croatan recommended itself as an appropriate evocation of their forgotten existence.

Tull has taken the trouble to republish several literary and scientific works from the Lost Colony. One of the volumes on display is
The Interpretation of Dreams
by a Viennese Jew alleged to have influenced the thinking of depth psychologist C.G. Jung. Another is
Relativity: The Special and the General Theory
by a German Jew similarly alleged to have anticipated some of the central ideas of particle physics. Several purely literary works include volumes from authors with names like Stein, Kafka, Zangwill, and Büchner

It was not a long night as such nights go. Many guests entered, spun about on a heel, and departed without even touching a ritual glass of champagne. Out of earshot of the Tull family circle, one heard comments like “waste of time,” “insulting,” and “appalling.” There were also comments like “interesting,” “different,” and “provocative,” though to be fair these were heard mostly within earshot of the Tull family circle, which by nine o’clock seemed to be running out of smiles. By nine-thirty smiles no longer mattered, since there was no longer anyone around to see them.

All the same, Croatan is well worth a visit, for it represents a curious and rather ghastly monument, rather like an ancient, bloodstained pyramid emerging from a jungle. Like many monuments of that kind, it both impresses and bewilders … inviting even the most kindly disposed philistine to wonder if perhaps young Jason Tull isn’t engaged in an elaborate leg-pull and snickering at us all from behind his hand.

• • •

This was a
rather middle-of-the-road account of the opening, which would have been widely covered even without the efforts of the family publicist.

Reactions to the gallery within the family were entirely predictable. Mother thought the whole project was original, valiant, and fascinating. Father did a first-class job of pretending that he wasn’t embarrassed and didn’t think the whole thing a colossal waste of time, talent, and money.

Mallory warned me before the opening that each of the attending critics would seek out one item to praise warmly and another to praise reservedly, and then, having manifested all this open-mindedness and fair-handedness, would maul the rest of the show with an easy conscience.

Surprisingly, three of DeCarava’s photos sold at the opening. Except for the republished books, nothing else was for sale. In all, seven books left the shop; I later checked the trash basket at the corner and found that three of them hadn’t made it any farther than that. Mallory declined to put prices on her paintings, pointing out that if none were for sale, none could fail to sell.

Business aside
, the opening had some aspects of an Old Home Week event. Mr. and Mrs. Hastings, Mallory’s “parents” (she always insists on the quote marks), made a brief, noisy appearance, looking as uneasy as two parrots on display at a cat show. The Fenshaws were there (I’d sent them plane tickets), Reggie in evening wear so dashingly antique that it looked positively Edwardian and Marcia in a dreadful thrift-shop gown in which she obviously felt very glamorous. They tried hard to persuade Mallory that she “owed it to the
world” to give them a firsthand account of her experience for their newsletter. They tried hard to persuade me that I would soon be ready for new investigative assignments, and looked positively crestfallen when I handed them a check that would keep We Live Again going for another five years, for they knew this meant I’d never be coming back to Tunis.

To no one’s surprise, Uncle Harry didn’t show up at the opening. Not his style. He quaintly sent a telegram bearing his best wishes. He hadn’t contacted me following my “lesson in the desert,” and I hadn’t expected him to. We understood each other. At last.

Croatan was an outgrowth of my comprehension and acceptance of the fact that “no one cared” about my great revelation. Croatan was what I would do
despite
the fact that no one cared. It was what I would do because
I
cared. None of that would have to be explained to Harry.

I did not, of course, become a shopkeeper when Croatan opened. That was never in my mind. I hired a young woman named Tanya, who had been an assistant manager at another gallery.

Quite a lot of money was spent on the design of the place. We wanted people to feel they could come in and browse without being expected to buy something. Croatan was to feel almost like an open arcade, an extension of the street, and it succeeded in this. Because of the gallery’s publicity and its enticing entrance, we received a surprising amount of foot traffic. Not sales. We didn’t expect sales, we hoped for interest, attention.

Then one night we got really lucky. Someone heaved a paving stone through the front window. We were ecstatic.

Someone
got it
. Someone
cared
.

I contacted our publicist early the following morning and directed her to alert all the news media to this event.

“This isn’t the kind of publicity you want,” she informed me.

“Oh, but it is, my dear. Don’t quote me, of course, but it’s very much the kind of publicity we want. Tell everyone that we’ll be replacing the window with specially strengthened glass. This will give the next brick-heaver something to aspire to.”

A few days later Uncle Harry dropped in and left his card. Tanya told me he’d spent almost an hour in the shop. He’d bought copies of the books by Freud and Einstein, as well as my favorite of the DeCarava photographs, of a tense and wary-looking Aryan couple on Fifth Avenue. He asked if I ever came to the shop, and she informed him I was there every Monday morning.

UNCLE HARRY STROLLED
into the shop on the following Monday at eleven. I was glad to see he’d left Clay behind.

We greeted each other as if nothing like a hypodermic needle had ever come between us.

I said, “I assume you heard about our brick-thrower.”

“Oh yes. Nice bit of luck for you.”

“You don’t seem upset to find out that
someone
cares, after all.”

“Certainly not. One can’t learn anything from being
right
, you know. How is Mallory liking it?”

“Liking what?”

“Her studio, the engagement, the gallery, her work.”

“She seems generally pleased but feels she’s leaving
abstract expressionism behind and moving on to something new.”

“I thought she would.”

“Doubtless so,” I sneered, “having added art criticism to your many accomplishments.”

He hadn’t heard me. He went on to say, “I really admire that girl.”

“I can tell you that you won’t remain her favorite uncle if you continue to refer to her as ‘that girl.’ ”

He smiled and shook his head indulgently. “I brought you this,” he said, drawing a portfolio-size envelope from under his arm and handing it to me.

“What is it?”

“Since you’ve taken up publishing, I thought you might like producing something original for a change, instead of just reprinting old work.”

At this point we took the conversation into a tiny office at the back, normally Tanya’s hideout. When we were seated, I opened the envelope and drew out a plastic-wrapped package containing three school-type notebooks. As I started to unwrap them, Harry said, “Use them gently, Jason. They’re two thousand years old and not made of the finest paper in the world.”

I turned back the cover of the notebook on top to have a peek inside. “It looks like German.”

“Not German,” Harry said. “Something rarer, I’m told. Dutch.”

“Where did they come from?”

“No one knows, really. They came to light rather like the last doll in a set of nesting dolls, found inside a pouch inside
a box inside a file cabinet inside a Washington warehouse, to which the cabinet had been routed by mistake just after the war. There they sat, century after century, since the cabinet didn’t belong to anyone and wasn’t of interest to anyone. The pouch itself was date-stamped September 1944, with a handwritten message in German that said, ‘See if the Commissioner wants these.’ ”

“Why do you think they deserve to be published?”

Harry shrugged. “I have no idea whether they deserve to be published or not, Jason. You’re the publisher, not me. They were found entirely by accident and referred to me entirely by accident, and I had the choice of throwing them in the trash or bringing them to you. Publish them or pulp them—it makes no difference to me.”

On his way out, Harry asked when Mallory and I intended to be married. I told him we were in no hurry and hadn’t set a date.

“I would accept an invitation to dinner,” he informed me solemnly.

“That’s good to know, Uncle Harry. Mallory’s a great admirer of yours, too, as you probably realize.”

I made
some enquiries and confirmed my guess, that Dutch had been extinct for a very, very long time—some seventeen or eighteen centuries, in fact. After more inquiries, I tracked down a scholar of ancient European languages and arranged to send her the notebooks for identification and evaluation.

After waiting several months I finally have her report and must decide whether to have the notebooks translated into
English or not. I must say I rather fancy the idea of becoming a real publisher and bringing out something never seen in print before in the whole history of the world.