Catalogue Raisonne (4 page)

At 7:45 I joined Hans, who was smoking his pipe under the self-portrait of J. E. (“Josh”) MacMahon, 1903-1977. MacMahon had been Hans's first boss and the first director of the gallery, going back to the days when the gallery was a one-room out-building loaned by the university on a corner of the campus.

“Look at those young fools,” Hans said, gesturing with his pipe at Lars and Leo, who were taking turns running a Hoover over random strips of carpet, while nearby Ramon was actually vacuuming. Sean was already pacing upstairs, self-exiled in anticipation of “the rabble”.

Finally, after a gruelling day, Hans was getting a breather. Relaxed enough to let the luxury of tolerance creep back in. I felt it too. This
was a calm you could actually savour, since it came between bouts of activity. Each opening, I waited for it.

I looked above Hans at the picture, its focus softened by the floating veils of smoke. A bald, kind-faced man, dressed in a suit and sitting in an armchair, hands folded quietly in his lap. I liked the picture, though as with most of the pictures I passed every day, I hadn't looked at it in a while. It might have been MacMahon's sentimental, or just accurate, view of himself, but it was done in robust, unafraid oils and framed in plain varnished oak. With, I noticed now – and couldn't recall noticing before – a pipe perched high on the edge of the bookcase behind him. A reformed smoker, the habit placed in view but out of easy reach? There was a hint of humour in the eyes, a jawline that could firm up if it needed to.

“He looks like an interesting man,” I said.

“Mr. MacMahon?” Hans looked up with unabashed reverence. “He was a grand old gentleman. Not like this crew,” he added, but with a sharp glance that pre-empted any elaboration of this by me. Though bound to the past, Hans actually thought quite highly of Walter, and anyway, wouldn't brook any very expanded criticism of an employer. There were times when I drew a line from Hans's habit of servility straight through to Nuremberg, before I remembered to allow for an immigrant's gratitude. He'd come here a few years after the war, a teenager from a bombed-flat country. Josh MacMahon had given him his first, and still his only, job in Canada.

“Is it true he and Casson used to ski down Main Street to sketch?” I asked.

I knew it was, but it was a story Hans loved to tell.

A
nd on a personal note,” Walter concluded his short speech, “I'd like to thank Neale on behalf of all of us for bringing this milestone exhibition to grace our gallery.”

The burst of applause was heartier than it needed to be, perhaps signifying a group effort to dispel the torpor induced by the mayor's long,
droning, often ignorant and at times nonsensical, introduction. His Worship actually wore his chain of office in public, especially to functions like this, like a portly ham actor at an audition for the part of Cardinal Wolsey. Laughter was not always kept in check until he had moved a decent few steps away. His “addressed remarks” had included a congratulatory telegram from the Lieutenant-Governor, sadly unable to attend, but wishing “every success and a long run,” perhaps confusing the show with a play.

“Throughout the long months of its careful preparation,” Walter went on, somewhat confusingly since he seemed to have finished already, “he has shown nothing but the most scrupulous dedication to his project, meticulous attention to the smallest details, the diligence of a true scholar, and, er, unwavering persistence in the face of, er, philistinism. Neale?”

The laughter, still mayorally enhanced, at Walter's philistine jibe and the artful “er”s that framed it, subsided slowly as Neale rose. He was frowning faintly. He walked lopingly to the lectern and stood for a few moments in silence, towering and swaying slightly, blinking from behind round wire-framed glasses, as if trying to bring the people below him into focus. They, seventy-five of them or so, held their plastic wine glasses and peered back at him, trying to do the same.

Start with the clothes. Whereas Walter had worn another well-calibrated black suit, cut sharply enough to distinguish him from the businessmen without quite alienating them, Neale was dressed, not badly, but confusingly. A scuffed but expensive-looking brown leather jacket over a fawn turtleneck sweater; dark brown cords; blond shiny cowboy boots, also leather, that elevated him up near the six and a half foot mark. It might have been a Toronto look, though it didn't really seem to be. Yet Toronto was assumed to come into it somehow. Of all the “statements” Neale made, or was suspected of making, the one clear and agreed-on one was that, although he'd only been an assistant curator at the AGO, still he was somehow slumming here. Address had something to do with this. Preferring to avoid rush hour traffic, he rented a top suite (rumoured to be mostly unfurnished) in the Bay 200 tower, but late every Friday night, at the end of his five-day exile, he returned to the Big Smoke. Bud lived in Toronto too, but he took the
Go bus in each morning, which was somehow more excusable. Walter, on the other hand, lived in one of the posh nestled lanes below the escarpment, an old house sprucely landscaped, with the artistic license of “ground cover” instead of lawn. Barbara, just as impeccably, lived with her professor husband in a Tudor-style home in Westdale near the university.

Neale also gave the impression that he'd never lifted anything heavier than a martini glass. Never a winning impression in a steeltown. Not even in its art gallery. Even Walter managed to avoid it, dropping occasional mentions of his “mining days” in the summer while at university.

Before the mutual inspection got too far into the prickly stage, Neale gripped both sides of the lectern, and raising his eyes to a spot near the top of the closed curtains in the lounge, said, “Surrealism is not a new means of expression, or an easier one. It is a means of total liberation of the mind and of all that resembles it.” After a pause to let this sink in, he added, darting a piercing look downwards, “Bureau de Recherches Surréalistes, Declaration of January 27, 1925.”

This bad beginning did not lead, as it should have been bound to, to a better middle. It got, rather incredibly, worse. Other quotations followed the first, but even more esoteric and disjointed, without segues or explanatory stitching. The ending, after some perfunctory thanks to the gallery and its sponsors, marked the nadir:

“But now” – eyes swooping down above a chilly smile that might have been a parody, or only an awkward simulation, of friendliness – “Now, I wouldn't dream of detaining you for one instant longer from enjoying the splendid show that awaits you.”

The pattering of scattered clapping was very similar to, just a little louder than, the pattering of the gentle April rain that had awakened me that morning.

Luckily, Barbara was up last. As imperious as she could be, as imperious as she
was
, she was also very popular. As someone whose “hobby job” (officially three-quarters time, summers off, but she had more reasons than anybody to be out of the gallery) was recruiting volunteers and donors, she had to be. Also, it was hard to resent, or keep resenting anyway, someone so beautiful. Honey blonde hair, not obviously
tinted, contrasted well with an Aruba-Muskoka all-year tan; like the contrast between her semi-sheer white blouse, unbuttoned halfway, and her tight black skirt slit teasingly at the knees. Or – when the light or her movements brought them out – the brown-white-brown globes swinging loose within the blouse. All these contrasts, especially the latter one, had immobilized the six attendants, ranged around the perimeter of the lounge, to statues fitting Sean's fantasy of us as installation pieces. Sean, stationed at the door for his getaway after the speeches, was no exception. Neither was I.

“Whoa, some party! Some
night
!” Barbara began breathlessly, with a shivery toss of her hair. A ragged cheer went up, like the recovery after the mayor's bomb. Barbara took this little material and worked with it, smiling and swaying with enthusiasm about the show and the turn-out and the expected crowds, and . . . . After just enough of this, she switched keys and began thanking “all the people, too many to name so I apologize to whoever I'm leaving out, who made the show possible.” But then she actually
did
manage to name them all, at least all that I could think of. “Walter, of course, first and foremost; Bud, for being everybody's right – and left – hand man; Peter and Jason, for their usual meticulous work; dear Angela, for putting up with all of us – ”

That embarrassed feeling again, the one twinned with guilt, when I caught Angela's naked look of gratitude. No one but me could guess the number of times “that woman” had driven her to tears with insatiable and often petty demands, all last-minute and top-priority.

“ – and of course,
my God
, our dear demented, utterly
inspired
author of this enchanted evening. Let's hear it for
him
.”

And Neale, looking more glum than demented, actually brightened, grinning crookedly into the applause, real and sustained this time, and into the jouncing activity within the white blouse.

It was impressive, really, to watch Barbara turn dewy eyes on each person she thanked, finding them in the crowd with a smile. Watching her, I realized there was no way to distinguish the genuine from the artificial in a true “people person”. That was what being a people person meant. Statements to the contrary, by cynics such as Sean, by myself sometimes, amounted to a kind of bitter faith, the adolescent's creed that sincerity cannot be faked.

That would have been a good place to end. From a dramatic, if not a human, point of view. But Barbara did not neglect, though she kept it short, to pay tribute to “Hans and Ramon and the other attendants, who keep us safe and help in a thousand ways. And to my volunteers, true ‘angels of the arts' – a phrase you hear bandied about, but absolutely and precisely true in this instance — I don't know how you . . . I just have to marvel every day . . . at your devotion, your energy. . . .” Looking about the room as she seemed about to lose it, seeking the faces of various well-dressed women, she seemed to transfer her desperate feeling from her eyes into theirs, which filled and in some cases overflowed. “Thank you for your love of art,” she said softly.

The tumult of noise that followed this was like the chaotic expression of primal energies that have been called forth, heightened but also artfully contained. Like one of those science diagrams where the molecules have been whipped up like a stirred hive of bees, dotted trails showing where they try to zip out of their canister, bounce off walls and collide with each other, energy directed outward but really feeding on itself.

The opening went back to what it had been before the speeches. A sort of cocktail party, with the guests drifting between the lounge and the lobby, occasionally wandering out into the gallery itself. The attendants were all on duty and in uniform, the public face of gallery security, but at invitation-only openings like this we were encouraged to mingle. Walter didn't even mind us with a glass of wine in our hands, as long as it wasn't overdone. Only one guard was actually stationed in the surrealist show, the only gallery some guests were visiting. Sean, of course, had volunteered. Neale, looking sour again, led a few small groups back on very short tours; then Walter took over, managing to stretch the visits a bit, perhaps with side excursions. But nobody stayed back there very long, and it didn't detract seriously from the party. After an hour or so, all who wanted to had made their pilgrimage.

One thing that did detract from the party, and quite seriously after a
bit, was Robert's piano playing. Robert was another of the Burns guards in the basement, an aspiring musician and my regular chess partner, who had offered to play “cocktail piano” before his night shift began at 11. Walter, for some reason, had agreed. A lapse, perhaps. Robert's playing could be good; I'd heard him let it be in stretches. But tonight it was the more usual mix, a melee of lounge and jazz and pseudo-classical styles. A drunken Dudley Moore imitating Thelonius Monk playing “The Lady is a Tramp”. Dizzyingly bad. Luckily, the conversation was too loud to catch more than selected trills and chord stomps. The artfully placed single notes, the pianist bending low, hanks of hair grazing the keys Glenn Gouldishly, went unnoticed. Drowned by other sounds.

The trouble was plain already when Robert made his windy entrace, black bow tie worn askew over his usual white shirt and shapeless black pants, the unruly hair swept back with water, wild curls escaping. He had to have been thinking of the young Gould, as he'd appeared on the cover of “The Goldberg Variations”. Robert always tried to make a splash, but after people got used to his eccentricities, they went largely unnoticed. The long black trench coat (in season now, but also worn in January and July), its belt ends dangling, flapping at his gangly, big-boned frame; the cavernous scuffed brown briefcase with brass clasps and lock, from which he was never separated and which he claimed contained the symphony he was working on – it definitely contained hundreds of scraps of paper, some of which had staff lines and musical notes on them.