Overhead in a Balloon (5 page)

So soon, thought Speck. It was only their second meeting. It seemed discourteous to draw attention to the full generation that lay between them; experience had taught him that acknowledging any fragment of this dangerous subject did more harm than good. When widows showed their cards, he tried to look like a man with no time for games. He thought of the young André Malraux, dark and tormented, the windblown lock on the worried brow, the stub of a Gauloise sending up a vagabond spiral of smoke. Unfortunately, Speck had been born forty years too late for the model; he belonged to a much reedier generation of European manhood. He thought of the
Pope. White-clad, serene, he gazed out on St. Peter’s Square, over the subdued heads of one hundred thousand artists’ widows, not one of whom would dare.

“So this was the Cruche family home,” he said, striking out, he hoped, in a safe direction.

“The furniture was his mother’s,” said Lydia Cruche. “I got rid of most of it, but there was stuff you couldn’t pay them to cart away.
Sa petite Maman adorable
,” she said softly. Again Speck heard the string of silver bells. “I thought she was going to hang around forever. They were a tough family – peasants from the west of France. She took good care of him. Cooked him sheep’s heart, tripe and onions, big beefsteaks they used to eat half raw. He was good-looking, a big fellow, big for a Frenchman. At seventy you’d have taken him for forty. Never had a cold. Never had a headache. Never said he was tired. Drank a litre of Calvados every other day. One morning he just keeled over, and that was that. I’ll show you a picture of him sometime.”

“I’d also like to see
his
pictures,” said Speck, thankful for the chance. “The pictures you said you had upstairs.”

“You know how I met Hube? People often ask me that. I’m surprised you haven’t. I came to him for lessons.”

“I didn’t know he taught,” said Speck. His most reliable professional trait was his patience.

“He didn’t. I admired him so much that I thought I’d try anyway. I was eighteen. I rang the bell. His mother let me in. I never left – he wouldn’t let me go. His mother often said if she’d known the future she’d never have answered the door. I must have walked about four miles from a tram stop, carrying a big portfolio of my work to show him. There wasn’t even a paved street then – just a patch of nettles out front and some vacant lots.”

Her work. He knew he had to get it over with: “Would you like to show me some of your things, too?”

“I burned it all a long time ago.”

Speck’s heart lurched. “But not his work?”

“It wasn’t mine to burn. I’m not a criminal.” Mutely, he looked at the bare walls. “None of Hube’s stuff ever hung in here,” she said. “His mother couldn’t stand it. We had everything
she
liked – Napoleon at Waterloo, lighthouses, coronations. I couldn’t touch it when she was alive, but once she’d gone I didn’t wait two minutes.”

S
peck’s eighteenth-century premises were centrally heated. The system, which dated from the early nineteen-sixties, had been put in by Americans who had once owned most of the second floor. With the first dollar slide of the Nixon era they had wisely sold their holdings and gone home, without waiting for the calamity still to come. Their memorial was an expensive, casual gift nobody knew what to do with; it had raised everyone’s property taxes, and it cost a fortune to run. Tenants, such as Speck, who paid a fat share of the operation, had no say as to when heat was turned on, or to what degree of temperature. Only owners and landlords had a vote. They voted overwhelmingly for the lowest possible fuel bills. By November there was scarcely a trace of warmth in Speck’s elegant gallery, his cold was entrenched for the winter, and Walter was threatening to quit. Speck was showing a painter from Bruges, sponsored by a Belgian cultural-affairs committee. Cost-sharing was not a habit of his – it lowered the prestige of the gallery – but in a tight financial season he sometimes
allowed himself a breather. The painter, who clearly expected Speck to put him under contract, talked of moving to Paris.

“You’d hate it here,” said Speck.

Belgian television filmed the opening. The Belgian royal family, bidden by Walter, on his own initiative, sent regrets signed by aides-de-camp on paper so thick it would scarcely fold. These were pinned to the wall, and drew more attention than the show itself. Only one serious critic turned up. The rooms were so cold that guests could not write their names in the visitors’ book – their hands were too numb. Walter, perhaps by mistake, had invited Blum-Weiler-Blochs instead of Blum-Bloch-Weilers. They came in a horde, leading an Afghan hound they tried to raffle off for charity.

The painter now sat in the gallery, day after day, smoking black cigarettes that smelled of mutton stew. He gave off a deep professional gloom, which affected Walter. Walter began to speak of the futility of genius – a sure sign of melancholia. Speck gave the painter money so that he could smoke in cafés. The bells of St. Clotilde’s clanged and echoed, saying to Speck’s memory, “Fascist, Fascist, Fascist.” Walter reminded Speck that November was bad for art. The painter returned from a café looking cheerful. Speck wondered if he was enjoying Paris and if he would decide to stay; he stopped giving him money and the gallery became once more infested with mutton stew and despair. Speck began a letter to Henriette imploring her to come back. Walter interrupted it with the remark that Rembrandt, Mozart, and Dante had lived in vain. Speck tore the letter up and started another one saying that a Guillaumin pastel was missing and suggesting that Henriette had taken it to Africa. Just as he was tearing this up, too, the telephone rang.

“I finally got Hube’s stuff all straightened out,” said Lydia Cruche. “You might as well come round and look at it this afternoon. By the way, you may call me ‘Lydia,’ if you want to.”

“Thank you,” said Speck. “And you, of course, must call me –”

“I wouldn’t dream of it. Once a doctor always a doctor. Come early. The light goes at four.”

Speck took a pill to quiet the pounding of his heart.

I
n her summing-up of his moral nature, a compendium that had preceded her ringing “Fascist”s, Henriette had declared that Speck appraising an artist’s work made her think of a real-estate loan officer examining Chartres Cathedral for leaks. It was true that his feeling for art stopped short of love; it had to. The great cocottes of history had shown similar prudence. Madame de Pompadour had eaten vanilla, believed to arouse the senses, but such recklessness was rare. Cool but efficient – that was the professional ticket. No vanilla for Speck; he knew better. For what if he were to allow passion for painting to set alight his common sense? How would he be able to live then, knowing that the ultimate fate of art was to die of anemia in safe-deposit vaults? Ablaze with love, he might try to organize raids and rescue parties, dragging pictures out of the dark, leaving sacks of onions instead. He might drop the art trade altogether, as Walter kept intending to do, and turn his talents to cornering the onion market. The same customers would ring at election time, saying, “Dr. Speck, what happens to my onion collection if the Left gets in? Shouldn’t we try to unload part of it in New York now, just to be on the safe side?” And Speck, unloading onions of his own in Tokyo, would answer,
“Don’t worry. They can’t possibly nationalize all the onions. Besides, they aren’t going to win.”

Lydia seemed uninterested in Speck’s reaction to Cruche. He had expected her to hang about, watching his face, measuring his interest, the better to nail her prices; but she simply showed him a large, dim, dusty, north-facing room in which canvases were thickly stacked against the walls and said, “I wasn’t able to get the light fixed. I’ve left a lamp. Don’t knock it over. Tea will be ready when you are.” Presently he heard American country music rising from the kitchen (Lydia must have been tuned to the
BBC
) and he smelled a baking cake. Then, immersed in his ice-cold Cruche encounter, he noticed nothing more.

About three hours later he came downstairs, slowly, wiping dust from his hands with a handkerchief. His conception of the show had been slightly altered, and for the better, by the total Cruche. He began to rewrite the catalogue notes: “The time has come for birth …” No – “for rebirth. In a world sated by overstatement the moment is ripe for a calm …” How to avoid “statement” and still say “statement”? The Grand Architect was keeping Speck in mind. “For avouchment,” said Speck, alone on the stairs. It was for avouchment that the time had come. It was also here for hard business. His face became set and distant, as if a large desk were about to be shoved between Lydia Cruche and himself.

He sat down and said, “This is going to be a strong show, a powerful show, even stronger than I’d hoped. Does everything I’ve looked at upstairs belong to you outright? Is there anything which for any reason you are not allowed to lend, show, or sell?”

“Neither a borrower nor a lender be,” said Lydia, cutting caramel cake.

“No. Well, I am talking about the show, of course.”

“No show,” she said. “I already told you that.”

“What do you mean, no show?” said Speck.

“What I told you at the beginning. I told you not to count on me. Don’t drop boiled frosting on your trousers. I couldn’t get it to set.”

“But you changed your mind,” said Speck. “After saying ‘Don’t count on me,’ you changed your mind.”

“Not for a second.”

“Why?” said Speck, as he had said to the departing Henriette. “Why?”

“God doesn’t want it.”

He waited for more. She folded her arms and stared at the blank television set. “How do you know that God doesn’t want Hubert Cruche to have a retrospective?”

“Because He said so.”

His first thought was that the Grand Architect had granted Lydia Cruche something so far withheld from Sandor Speck: a plain statement of intention. “Don’t you know your Commandments?” she asked. “You’ve never heard of the graven image?”

He searched her face for the fun, the teasing, even the malice that might give shape to this conversation, allow him to take hold of it. He said, “I can’t believe you mean this.”

“You don’t have to. I’m sure you have your own spiritual pathway. Whatever it is, I respect it. God reveals himself according to each person’s mental capacity.”

One of Speck’s widows could prove she descended from Joan of Arc. Another had spent a summer measuring the walls of Toledo in support of a theory that Jericho had been in Spain. It was Speck’s policy never to fight the current of
eccentricity but to float with it. He said cautiously, “We are all held in a mysterious hand.” Generations of Speck freethinkers howled from their graves; he affected not to hear them.

“I am a Japhethite, Dr. Speck. You remember who Noah was? And his sons, Ham, Shem, and Japheth? What does that mean to you?” Speck looked as if he possessed Old Testament lore too fragile to stand exposure. “Three,” said Lydia. “The sacred number. The first, the true, the only source of Israel. That crowd Moses led into the desert were just Egyptian malcontents. The true Israelites were scattered all over the earth by then. The Bible hints at this for its whole length. Japheth’s people settled in Scotland. Present-day Jews are impostors.”

“Are you connected to this Japheth?”

“I do not make that claim. My Scottish ancestors came from the border country. The Japhethites had been driven north long before by the Roman invasion. The British Israelite movement, which preceded ours, proved that the name ‘Hebrides’ was primitive Gaelic for ‘Hebrew.’ The British Israelites were distinguished pathfinders. It was good of you to have come all the way out here, Dr. Speck. I imagine you’ll want to be getting back.”

After backing twice into Lydia’s fence, Speck drove straight to Galignani’s bookshop, on Rue de Rivoli, where he purchased an English Bible. He intended to have Walter ransack it for contra-Japhethite pronouncements. The orange dust jacket surprised him; it seemed to Speck that Bibles were usually black. On the back flap the churches and organizations that had sponsored this English translation were listed, among them the National Bible Society of Scotland. He wondered if this had anything to do with Japheth.

As far as Speck could gather from passages Walter marked during the next few days, art had never really flourished, even
before Moses decided to put a stop to it. Apart from a bronze snake cast at God’s suggestion (Speck underscored this for Lydia in red), there was nothing specifically cultural, though Ezekiel’s visions had a certain surrealistic splendor. As Speck read the words “the terrible crystal,” its light flooded his mind, illuminating a simple question: Why not forget Hubert Cruche and find an easier solution for the cultural penury of the West? The crystal dimmed. Speck’s impulsive words that October night, “Cruche is coming back,” could not be reeled in. Senator Bellefeuille was entangled in a promise that had Speck at one end and Lydia at the other. Speck had asked if he might examine his lodge brother’s collection and had been invited to lunch. Cruche
had
to come back.

Believing Speck’s deliverance at hand, Walter assailed him with texts and encouragement. He left Biblical messages on Speck’s desk so that he had to see them first thing after lunch. Apparently the British Israelite movement had truly existed, enjoying a large and respectable following. Its premise that it was the British who were really God’s elect had never been challenged, though membership had dwindled at mid-century; Walter could find no trace of Lydia’s group, however. He urged Speck to drive to the north of Scotland, but Speck had already decided to abandon the religious approach to Cruche.

“No modern translation conveys the word of Japheth or of God,” Lydia had said when Speck showed her Walter’s finds. There had been something unusual about the orange dust jacket, after all. He did not consider this a defeat. Bible reading had raised his spirits. He understood now why Walter found it consoling, for much in it consisted of the assurance of downing one’s enemies, dashing them against stones, seeing their children reduced to beggary and their wives to despair.
Still, he was not drawn to deep belief: he remained rational, skeptical, anxious, and subject to colds, and he had not succeeded in moving Lydia Cruche an inch.