Memoir From Antproof Case (40 page)

When we had gone through all the planning and adjustment I said, "Well?" After which we sat in silence for ten minutes. So many emotions were welling up within Angelica Smedjebakken that sitting across from her was like watching a teapot on a red-hot burner.

"You can get by as you are, or maybe not," I said. "With what I propose, you can lose everything, or gain everything. If you say yes, you may be casting yourselves into oblivion. If you say no, oblivion may catch up with you sooner than you imagine. Our parents or grandparents or those further back were faced with the same kind of decision before they left for this country. All the work you can do with your mind brings you nothing but perfectly balanced symmetry, with the reasons for one thing or the other equally convincing, equally forbidding. This is something that you must decide with your heart. Your families have made such decisions before, and you'll know what to do."

Angelica broke into tears. Despite the fact that I was deeply moved, I smiled, for I could see that to the central movement of her life, the part that had already been set down, she was going to add a cadenza, and if there is anything I love more I know not what it is—when the pianist becomes so enthralled with the piece that he is following that he begins to compose it himself. Cadenzas are full and fast and they come not as a matter of technique but from love, power, and elation. They are a great declaration. In their unfolding it is as if the pianist is saying to the composer: "Yes. I understand what you understand. I feel what you feel. I know you. Your hands are my hands, your eyes my eyes, your heart my heart." The cadenza Angelica was adding was not to a concerto but to her life, and she shuddered
and wept because, in her resolution, she had glimpsed the whole of her existence as if through the composer's eyes.

 

I next returned to Astoria on one of those fall days when the sky is cerulean and the air like glass. These are the days when smoke rises in straight columns, and every detail of the landscape is as suddenly visible as if it had been emphasized by an engraver. The tugs were busy gliding downriver, green and black, coamings of white foam parting perpetually from their bows.

Smedjebakken himself was a handsome man, even if perhaps a wee bit too stolid, and his wife was the ideal model for an Italian painter of the Renaissance. And their daughter, despite her affliction, was more beautiful than even her mother. I met her that day, in the front parlor of her parents' house. From the back came a workshop of notes, as if from an orchestra tuning before a concert, but solely from pianos. And through the windows I could see the blue sky hanging weightlessly over the worn brick of Astoria.

Her mother and father were packing boxes in preparation for the move. Smedjebakken brought me to her room, introduced us, and went back to his work. Perhaps because of the child's incomparable beauty, I was almost unaffected by her involuntary movements. I didn't know it, but I began to move with her, to track steadily the slate-blue eyes that had to roam when she could not hold still.

She said, "It's okay to move with me a little: Mommy and Daddy do. It makes me feel that I'm not moving myself." She fought to get the words out, as if they were held by elastic bands that had to stretch with them as they were said, and that could stop them and pull them back.

"I didn't even know I was doing that."

"It's okay."

"I'm glad to meet you," I said. "I know how much your mother and father love you, and I understand why. You are a very lovely child. I've never seen a child with eyes like yours—or a grownup, for that matter."

"That's where my whole life is," she said, "in my eyes."

I nodded.

"I don't want to move to Manhattan."

"I know. Your father told me. When I was about your age, I had to move from the only house I had ever known. But the circumstances were much different."

"Why?" she asked, and though it sounded like
Wha-eee,
it was, somehow, perfectly natural.

"They were terrible," I said, "just terrible, but I got over them, and I got over the moving. And you will, too. I moved to a place where I had a rope that hung from a tree bent over a pool in a river. I flew off that rope ten thousand times, and each flight freed me a little bit from the unhappiness of having been forced from home. Now, I remember the tree leaning over the pool with the same affection and sadness that I had had for the place I left."

"I can't fly off the end of a swinging-rope," she said.

"But you can swim," I answered. "And in your new place you're going to swim twice a day."

She smiled.

"And, also," I told her, "because you'll be burning up so much food with all the exercise, I'll bet your mother will allow you to stop at the candy store every day you swim."

"She will?"

"I can't promise, but I'll suggest it. When I do a lot of exercise, I allow myself a treat. I just have to be careful not to eat more than one small bite, because if I do I tend to gain weight. But you're a kid, you won't have to be careful."

"I won't," she said. "I'm skinny."

"You're
svelte,
" I told her.

"What does that mean?"

. "It means just right, with a nod to the thin side. It's Swedish. You'll learn it when you learn Swedish." (Actually, as I found out years later at the Naval Academy, it's French. I had thought that it was one of those words, like
bistro,
that the French had borrowed whole from the barbarians.)

"Why would I learn Swedish?"

"Because you're a Smedjebakken."

"Because I'm a
what?
" she asked, amused. It was clear that her parents had not told her everything.

"Because all little girls with blue eyes are Smedjebakkens, and sooner or later they learn Swedish. Swedish is a language so wonderful that speaking it gives you the same feeling you get when you sing, play the piano, or paddle a canoe."

"Do you speak Swedish?"

"No."

"Then how do you know?"

"I speak fake Swedish," I said. And then I spoke to her for a few minutes in fake Swedish, which I can generate for hours on end, and with which I have truly stunned visiting Swedish businessmen and bankers, regaling them for the lengths of whole lunches with tales told in a language neither they nor I understood. When I was finished, I said to Constance, "Your father will teach you."

"How can
he
teach me?"

"He speaks it fluently."

"He does?"

"Yes."

She swelled with pride. "I do want to speak Swedish," she said. "I'm already learning Italian."

"Good. Italian is like talking to a bird. Swedish is like the bird talking."

She laughed.

"And here's another thing," I revealed. "Where you're moving, you'll be able to see Central Park, skyscrapers, a beautiful lake, and the sunset, all from very high up. You'll have a wonderful terrace with lots of plants and flowers—little dwarf pines in tubs, herbs, geraniums, roses, arugula. And guess what?"

"What?"

"The terrace has a drain and a hose. On hot summer days you can fill up a rubber pool and splash in the sun."

"That sounds good," she told me. She was beginning to change her mind about moving.

"You'll have your own room, on the same floor as everything else, so you'll be able to get around more easily than you can here. There's an elevator in the building, too. No bumping down the stoop. You'll be going to a new school, where you'll have many new and fascinating things to learn. And, finally, your father is going to buy you a Steinway D, which a Juilliard student will use for practice every day. You'll have what you love, because your father and your mother love you."

I embraced her. Her unstoppable motion felt much like that of an infant, and I realized that, in the transit of just a few minutes, I had come to love this child.

She was not likely to know love, marriage, and motherhood. The young, who court and breed, are ruthless. It is only natural. Think of the effects of, let us say, a large nose, or bad teeth. Then think of Connie Massina, of all the soulful beauty, of all the knowingness and deep feeling, of all the love, that would be wasted. It happens with elk and otters and hummingbirds, and it happens with us, as some of the finest of us, who are
lame, are culled from the herd. The herd is the cruelest thing that ever was, and I have always hated it.

 

The idea was that Smedjebakken and I would isolate ourselves from Angelica and Connie. Because the greatest catastrophe would be if Angelica were stripped of what had been my wealth and sent to jail with us, she was not to know anything. Nonetheless, and I can certainly say this now, she extracted from Smedjebakken an astonishing promise, that he would never have revealed even to the Angel Gabriel, and this was that before we robbed the bank we rob something else. It made no sense to me, and probably not to Smedjebakken either. I didn't want to do it, but he was duty-bound.

"I'm an amateur," he said to me one afternoon as we labored to turn the house in Astoria (now mine) into sleeping quarters for me, and a machine shop in which to make the specialized equipment we would need for the operation.

"So am I," I answered.

"Don't you think it would be better if we had some experience prior to such a big job?"

"No."

"Why not?"

"Many reasons. For example, beginners' luck. The very first time I shot an arrow I hit the bull's-eye. In my first poker game I cleaned the table. The first time I kissed a girl, we rose into the air like two hydrogen-filled blimps."

"She was fat?"

"She was happy. As I said, beginners' luck."

"I'm an engineer by profession," Smedjebakken said. "I don't believe in luck."

"What about the engineering reasons?" We were standing in the upper hallway of the house (my only asset), with brooms.
"If we commit two crimes we're twice as likely to get caught. Even if we don't get caught the first time, we may leave clues that, in conjunction with those we leave the second time, will lead to our otherwise avoidable apprehension. I want to come onto the field clean. I want to come out of nowhere. One thing I learned in flying is that the second attack on a target is just like the hundredth."

"That makes sense, but I just can't do it unless we go through some sort of practice run."

"All right," I told him, "we'll steal the
Madonna del Lago
from the Metropolitan Museum of Art." I had intended this to be a joke.

"You decided just like that?"

"I thought you wanted to steal something?" I said, rising to defend my position.

"I do."

"Okay, let's steal the
Madonna del Lago.
I have a plan." At this point I was both fully committed, and, of course, fully committable.

"When did you make the plan?"

"Just now."

"In a second?"

"It needs some refinement, but the essence is there. The essence always comes in a second, always easily, as if from the blue."

I had had wonderful ideas all my life—the antigravity box, the camel ranch in Idaho, artillery mail—but I had never been able to translate them into reality. Smedjebakken, however, knew nothing other than the translation of ideas into reality.

 

I may have been inspired in the first place by the decided advantage that Constance's father had loved the
Madonna del
Logo.
It is a painting that, though much respected, is assigned by the experts to the middle ground of the great works of art. I think they are mistaken, or perhaps just timid. It is so strong a painting that it cannot fail to alienate some of those whose job is to appraise it. In recognition of its quality, they boost it to the middle even though they hate it, while others, who love it but know that it is despised, lower it for the sake of amity between aficionados. This is what happens to strong things of sharp and clear definition in a world of difficulties where compromise is necessary for survival.

The
Mona Lisa
I have always found to have too many browns. She fills too much of the picture, and she looks unfortunately like someone who could have been Burt Lancaster's sister.
La Tempesta,
on the other hand, is one of those great paintings, like the
Madonna del Lago,
that is too imaginative and bright, too arresting, too colorful, too perplexing, for easy acceptance.

But the
Madonna del Lago
is a masterpiece of composition. The Madonna stands with child in arms on a point of land extending into the lake so that she is almost surrounded by blue, and when apprehended from afar she appears to be enveloped within a halo or an aurora. On her right side, a surflike wave is rampant in the air, glistening in the sun, poised forever. The water on the left is calm but shallow, its layers of shade and color balancing the wave opposite. The form of the painting is much like that of a Byzantine mosaic, with the waters taking the place of orbital rings or bands.

It is a masterpiece of color. The sky is variously powder blue, robin's egg, Wedgwood, gray-blue, and the gun-metal blue that often accompanies atmospheric disturbances. The lake runs in half a dozen colors, too, some nearly tropical, such as yellowish turquoise, some otherworldly, some simple, and some cool. The rocks are battle gray, the field a particular enameled green that must have come from a magical pit known only in the Renaissance, for no green today looks so wet and so hard, so deep, light, and luminous.

And it is a masterpiece of expression. The Madonna is neither demure nor contemplative. Nor is she calm. She smiles gently, in triumph. This is the expression one would think she would have, is it not? The expression she deserved? Hers is not a mortal, invidious triumph but a look of angelic elation so lovely that I long for it even now, for never have I seen more beauty in a human face.

Constance's father felt much the same, and sent an agent to Paris to engage Hiro Matsuye. In the Twenties, Hiro Matsuye was the best copyist in the world. He was so good that he was watched, his output closely cataloged by museums in a constant state of terror. At the time, without electron microscopy and advanced spectrographic analysis, it was impossible to distinguish between an original and the homage done it by Matsuye, though he would change a key element in the composition for the sake of avoiding foul play. But Mr. Lloyd convinced him, just this once and who knows at what price, to make the copy truly exact.