Petty Magic (14 page)

The Fine Art of Troublemaking

16.

This in my dreams is shown me; and her hair
Crosses my lips and draws my burning breath;
Her song spreads golden wings upon the air,
Life’s eyes are gleaming from her forehead fair,
And from her breasts the ravishing eyes of Death.

—Dante Gabriel Rossetti, “The Orchard-Pit”

T
HE GREAT
spruce Christmas tree still towers in the medieval sculpture hall, dozens of terra-cotta angels tucked among the boughs. Behind it stands a choir screen of gilded wrought iron appropriated from some Spanish cathedral. “Wow,” Justin says, his eyes wide and shining like a child’s. Then he remembers himself and glances at me. “I’ve never been here over the holidays before.”

We wander off in separate directions, he to inspect the terra-cotta angels and I to revisit one of my old favorites, a Flemish altarpiece near the hall entrance. Five wooden panels tell the story of Godelieve, patron saint of Flanders, who raided her parents’ larder to feed the poor and was later imprisoned for—get this
—witchcraft
.

Out of the corner of my eye I see a petite figure edging closer to view the scene at the bottom of the fourth panel: the strangling of poor St. Godelieve by a pair of thugs in jester suits. The person at my elbow is impolitely close now, which means the stranger is either severely myopic … or my sister.

“Hallo, Evelyn!” She’s grown a ridiculously large nose today—to keep Justin from recognizing her, I suppose.

I let out a groan, and when I turn to look for Justin I find Elsie at my other elbow, her eyes twinkling behind the dusty bifocals she wears as part of her own “disguise.”

“My my, Evelyn—you’re looking well.”

“Please
don’t. I just want to have a nice afternoon out. No funny business, for once.”

“You could have gone to any other museum, you know,” Elsie says.

“But he wanted to come here.”

Morven holds up an admonishing finger. “You might have suggested the Frick.”

“But you didn’t,” Elsie puts in.

“So don’t go blaming us for your own carelessness, Eve,” my sister says. “This is
our
spot, and if you don’t like it, you can take him somewhere else.”

I hurry away from them and rejoin Justin at the foot of the Christmas tree. “Do you think we might go over to the MoMA in a little while? I’m more in the mood for modern art today, I think.”

Justin scans his museum map and points to a doorway to our right. “Modern, eh? Why don’t we head upstairs?”

I lead him away by the hand and he casts a glance over his shoulder. “We just paid ten bucks to get in here and now you want to go someplace else? Have you seen someone you know?”

I look back but Morven and Elsie are gone—for the moment.

T
HE EUROPEAN
painting galleries upstairs are just as packed; the borne sofa in the Monet room is crowded with elderly Japanese women dozing openmouthed, and the guards are constantly having to ask the rubes not to touch the bronzes.

“Why does everyone have to walk around taking pictures?” Justin grumbles. “Why can’t they just
look
at the pictures?” For a while I make a game of stepping into the viewfinder just as some potbellied fool in a baseball cap has lined up a shot, purely for Justin’s amusement.

I was here the day this museum opened to the public, and over the years I’ve grown so familiar with its figures in stone and oils that I can greet them as old friends: Degas’s dancers and Renoir’s bathers, Burne-Jones’s melancholy maidens, the milky matrons of Sargent and William Merritt Chase. I just wish we could have them all to ourselves. I lean into him and whisper, “What if I could snap my fingers and make everyone in this gallery disappear?”

“Wouldn’t that be nice,” he replies as yet another tourist elbows him aside. I
could
make it happen, but he’ll never know that.

Justin pauses at a mostly unremarkable portrait of a portly man in advanced middle age, quill in hand, at a desk by an open window:
Herkimer Harvie, Signer of the Articles of Confederation, Writing His Memoirs
. “I wonder if they’re any good.”

“If what are any good?”

“His memoirs.”

“I daresay they’re out of print.”

“I want to have the kind of life that warrants a memoir,” Justin says as he turns away from the painting.

“Oh, but you—I’m sure you will.” I pause, then offer brightly: “I’m working on mine.”

He looks at me sidewise. “What, did you neglect to tell me you’re in recovery?”

“Oh, no, nothing like that,” I say with a toss of my head.

We amble up to another favorite of mine, Bastien-Lepage’s Joan of Arc: she stands in a wooded farmyard, rapt, as those saintly apparitions glimmer in the trees over her right shoulder. We linger before it in appreciative silence, marveling at its naturalism and the extraordinary face of the future maiden-warrior, the wide eyes and the sensitive mouth.

“What a wonderful painting,” he says at last.

“She was only nineteen when they burned her at the stake, you know.”

“Wow. I didn’t know she was that young.”

“But they never accused her of witchcraft. Do you know why?”

He cocks an eyebrow—just as Jonah used to.

“The Duchess of Burgundy examined her before the trial,” I say, “and told the court she was still a virgin. They wanted to charge her with witchcraft, but they couldn’t—on that technicality.” Just think of it: a three-minute gallop with a handsome young farmhand and history would have treated her entirely differently.

T
HE HEATHEN
and the abstract don’t interest me so much. If I were to come back after closing time I’d find the occasional possessed object, a bogey mask or a bug-eyed totem, clanking furiously against the glass case, but after the initial fright there’d be nothing to do but tap the glass and send the spirit on its way. We tour those other galleries full of weavings of parrot feathers and brass roosters left on the altars of dead African queens, intricately carved elephant tusks plenty big enough for a human shish kebab, but none of it captures my imagination.

We snag a bench in front of a war-painted canoe and Justin takes my hand, but we’re soon interrupted by a commotion behind us. A little old lady, I don’t have to tell you who, has just spilled the entire contents of her purse, and two young people are helping her pick up the scattered objects—three Altoids tins, an orange, at least a dozen aluminum crochet hooks, and a ball of rubber bands as big as a baby’s head—amid her copious exclamations of gratitude.

My sister crouches spryly on the floor gathering up stray tissues and peppermints in cellophane wrappers. The two do-gooders, having exchanged a crackling electric shock while brushing hands on the floor, are now engaged in quiet but animated conversation.

Morven snaps the latch on her purse and approaches our bench. I glare at her, but she pays me no heed as she plops herself down right next to Justin and brushes a strand of hair from her eyes with a loud contented sigh. Out of nowhere Elsie materializes at my elbow and we find ourselves hemmed in, the two troublemakers leaning over and speaking in stage whispers across us.

My sister glances at me and clucks with approval. “What a
lovely
girl. She has a very
old-fashioned
beauty, wouldn’t you say, Elsie?”

“She’s cutting a dash, all right. Prettiest girl in the whole museum, and no mistake.”

“She certainly is.” Morven meets Justin’s eyes and leans in conspiratorially. “Is she your girlfriend?”

Justin reddens, then remembers himself and sits up straighter. “I’d like her to be.”

“Oh, but I’m sorry to hear that, dearie. She looks like a bit of a heartbreaker, that one.”

Plainly he can’t decide if he should be amused or annoyed by this, but in a moment he’s decided on the former. “What makes you say that?”

I cut in before she can answer him. “Excuse me, Justin.” I stand up and brush the folds from my skirt. “I’ve got to use the ladies’.” I stride out of the gallery and Morven hurries after me. “Lovely to meet you, young man!” she calls, and follows me into the bathroom.

“Pyoo! It stinks in here.”

“It
is
a lavatory, Evelyn.”

“Your nose is so big it has ceased to function.” I yank her into a stall, slam the door and turn the latch behind us, and point to the toilet. “You’re going home.
Now.”

“Hah! Just you make me.”

I have to admit I’ve been bested.

I
T’S SOMETHING
of a novelty for me, this opportunity to observe a man in broad daylight, and of course I find myself looking for signs of Jonah. Justin carries himself with all the confidence and fearlessness of youth, and that in itself is unfamiliar to me, but if I’d met Jonah fifteen years earlier, I might not have recognized him either. When I do catch some small familiar tic—the way he absently scratches the nape of his neck with his forefinger, how he cocks his eyebrow, or that distant half smile as he’s examining a painting—it’s like seeing the ghost of a ghost.

An elderly gent drops his hat and Justin bends automatically to pick it up for him; whenever he approaches a new painting he glances behind him to make sure he isn’t blocking somebody else’s view. He won’t be chasing skirts forever—and to be fair, I don’t once catch him looking at another girl’s cleavage.

We pause for a spell in the Greek Sculpture Court, the benches around the marble monuments crowded with harried young parents and old folks watching the world go by. A man in a tweed jacket sketches a family grave stele, and passersby gaze over his shoulder with murmurs of admiration.

Justin gasps. “It’s those little old ladies again!” I glance round and he says, “Over there. No, don’t look, you’ll encourage them.”

I can’t help laughing out loud. Morven’s gaze snaps to me in an instant, and she grins like the Cheshire cat.

Meanwhile Elsie is gazing up at a statue of Apollo. “What’s this, then?” she says loudly, jabbing a gnarled finger at a strategically placed fig leaf.

“They tacked that on afterward, you know,” my sister replies.

“Fig leaves!” Elsie huffs. “Always spoiling the fun.”

“Oh, but they couldn’t leave his rude bits hanging out for all the world to see, now, could they?” Everyone in the immediate vicinity is tittering away now, but the two troublemakers pretend not to notice.

“Sure they could,” says Elsie. “One doesn’t see them nearly often enough.”

“Speak for yourself!” Morven cries, and the crowd erupts in laughter. I watch the frown lines melt from the foreheads of those harried young mothers and consider that perhaps the two old dames aren’t wasting their time after all.

The walls of this museum are positively dripping with concupiscence; I don’t need Morven and Elsie to tell me that. In a glass case outside the hall of armor, a two-tailed siren in bronze sings her irresistible song; the melon-breasted nymphs and gyrating Natarajas in sandstone and granite, the bridal pairs in rapturous embrace; the beautiful boys, heroes and demigods, trapped in marble and plaster; all the period rooms where one might tarry for a moment, with a hand resting gently on the velvet cord, and envision another life in another, more decadent time. Ignoring for a moment the inquisitive schoolchildren and the electric lights flickering in the candelabras, you imagine how you would fall asleep every night under a ceiling all done up like a wedding cake, in a bedstead festooned with petit-point tapestries that cost the eyes of a hundred Flemish women, the putti on the walls paused in their merriment to witness your lovemaking. In one such room he catches my eye and smiles a secret smile.

W
E STAND
in front of a glass case filled with trinkets of the tragically frivolous, gilded powder pots and diamond-studded snuffboxes. “Do you ever look at these things and figure what they’re worth?” I ask.

I glance at him—he’s looking a trifle sheepish. “Sometimes,” he says.

I move on to the next case—an array of tacky Sevres vases. “And I wonder how often your uncle has picked up things at estate sales he’s bought and sold already.”

“It happens,” he admits. “Boomerang pieces, they call them. Fawkes seems to think it’s awfully funny, but Uncle Harry is embarrassed.”

“Not too embarrassed to turn another profit,” I say archly, and Justin shrugs.

Take the average woman who comes into the shop, someone who might spend several hundred dollars on a piece of charming old jewelry. Does it ever occur to her that the contents of her drawers may very well wind up in a jumble on a flea-market table, that her grave may be “excavated” and those precious rings slipped from her finger bones? Does she ever imagine that, should she purchase a bauble today, the thing may be on display again inside that very case fifty years hence—or under museum glass a hundred or a thousand years from now?

Every item, down to the tiniest gilded gimcrack, is irrefutable proof you can’t take it with you. And yet the lucky ones live on in their portraits and busts; their likenesses will be remembered even if their names are not.