Pictures at an Exhibition (2 page)

When the time came to take my winter exams, Father explained that he could not “with good conscience” pass his beautiful gallery down to me. The day before, there was news of Kristallnacht in Berlin; Mother had said, “surely your courses will be canceled,” but they were not.

For a year, we did not rehearse the paintings. Rather, I rehearsed Father's sudden rejection: I lacked, he had said, the memory, the business acumen, the ruthlessness, and the lucidity of vision to predict what could be bought one spring and sold a dozen Junes hence. “I wish for you a stable life,” he said.
“My
father drove too fast.” This I did not hear. I was made to fill out the exams and forms for the schooling that would land me in the hospital, not as a patient like my father long ago, but as a doctor. I resolved to fail as brilliantly as I had once studied to inherit the gallery. Eventually, Father and I resumed our nightly study of the paintings, but it was never the same as before. I was seventeen years old.

PART TWO
1939-1940

Woman in White
B
ERTHE
M
ORISOT

Chapter Two

I
FIRST LEARNED OF ROSE CLéMENT WHEN I WAS NINE
-teen and she was twenty-one. In the end, she will prove the most.indispensable of us all. In January of 1939, however, I understood her only as the object of my envy. I did not understand that we were living on borrowed time.

“Hide this from your mother,” Father said, and handed
Paris Soir
to me. He smoothed his mustache. “I have to interview a new assistant tomorrow. The boss”—this meant René Huyghe, curator of the Louvre's department of paintings and sculpture—”says she's got the best eye the museum's seen since Louis Quatorze walked through the Salon Carré. That old adage. He insists she still work on some extravagant project of theirs for a few hours each week, stockpiling sandbags at the museum and refitting Notre-Dame's stained glass windows with putty so they are easier to remove in case the bombing starts. I suppose I must learn to compromise.”

Before I was of the age to work alongside my father, I had greeted the arrival of his new apprentices with glee. Every two years, he took on one of the Louvre's young, underpaid curators. As a child, I enjoyed the uninterrupted stream of older-brother figures. They were debonair. Some spoke French with an accent; one came from as far as Delhi. They had excellent taste in clothing, cigarettes, women, and—I realized later—men. I learned to blow smoke rings, to discern between interchangeable Braques and Picassos (they said Braque's
lines were blunter, Picasso's more fluid), to iron a shirt, and to say, “The night is beautiful and so are you. Kiss me,” in Swedish.

In the years between the wars, the curators-in-training traveled with my father from the Prado to the Uffizi and from the Rijks -museum to the British. They went to the Hermitage to discuss the acceptable humidity ranges for Byzantine triptychs and to the Vatican to examine the separation of soot from fresco. I had a dusty collection of trinkets and snow globes, one from each city Father visited. The apprentices occupied an apartment off the gallery, inexplicably called the Nurse's Room, which could be entered either from the gallery's main floor or through a separate door in the courtyard. My father liked his trainees to challenge him, to suggest purchases and donations, and to worship Manet with a passion verging on the unsound. They visited artists’ studios alongside my father and decided which paintings to buy before they were finished and which finished paintings to buy, in order to ensure that the dross never reached the market. Apprentices learned to keep a silken scrim between the Berenzon Gallery and its clients. A buyer eager for a painting was not cause enough to sell it; rather, Father placed the paintings with owners who could add luster to the artist's reputation.

At my side that evening in January, my father resumed his ritual of recitation. “Sisley, 1926,” he said. I stood and began to walk around the room, pointing to the place on the wall where each painting had hung when I was six.

“Watering Place at Marly in the Snow, Banks of the Seine in Snow, The Bridge of Auvers-sur-Oise.”
My brain seized up. I couldn't remember the rest. Father listed them quickly.

He accused me, on that occasion and others, of possessing the ardor of an aristocratic art lover—once something was mine, I planned to keep it forever. Indeed, because I had to be removed from the gallery whenever my father sold a painting, I spent most of my childhood elsewhere, usually with Bertrand and Fanny Reinach, the grandchildren of the Count Moïses de Camondo and my favorite playmates. So that night, when, as I often had in the past, I asked why Father could not take
me
on as his assistant, he reminded me of my childhood temper. “All that wailing whenever we sold something,
throwing a tantrum, pulling at your mother's dress. We had to clear you out on the days the owners came to fetch their new paintings.” I began to speak, but he stopped me with a raised hand. “Don't worry yourself so. Time for sleep, my boy. Check that the main entrance is locked.” He gestured toward it with his chin. I was dismissed.

I wanted to pace the gallery's green floor in my own tuxedo. I wanted to have a near-photographic memory like my father. But as I did not, I needed the gallery there to guide me. I raised my fist to strike the glass door. Yet because my father was not a man of violence, of sharp words or brutish action, I lowered my hand.

THAT NEXT DAY, IN EXPECTATION OF MY ENEMY'S
arrival, I dawdled in the living room with its convenient heating vent. When she came, Mademoiselle Clément's heels clicked a double staccato down the hallway. I peered into the gallery and glimpsed one slender leg, a high-arched foot, and the black shoe dangling from it.

“Shall we discuss the influence of Spanish artists on French painters?” my father said.

“In Spanish or French?” Mademoiselle Clément asked.

“French will be fine.”

The girl talked and talked. I imagined that she had a large gold key sticking out from between her shoulder blades like a pair of wings and that an attendant continually wound it. Father stifled a yawn. She instructed him on the details of Manet's single visit to Spain in 1865. She informed my father of facts he already knew in a voice that did not take this into consideration. My irritation turned to curiosity.

“My fascination lies primarily in Goya's influence on Manet. Manet adopts the composition of Goya's history paintings in order to layer his own critique of Napoleon's regime with Goya's condemnation of French barbarism in Spain. I'm thinking of the connection between
The Execution of the Emperor Maximilian of Mexico
and Goya's
3 May 1808.”

Through the chute came Manet's interest in eliminating the
halftones of the palette and his lasting friendship with the painter Berthe Morisot, who was also his sister-in-law. Rose cited Baudelaire's essay, “The Painter of Modern Life,” and Zola's defense of
Olympia.

“Bravo,” I whispered. I could not compete with the mind that belonged to the woman with the beautiful instep. I felt awe and envy, one of which registered in my ribs and the other in my stomach. Her voice reminded me of the flute solo in
Daphnis and Chloé
, the sound of waving scarves, diaphanous colors, a changeful pitch unwilling to rest on any note but returning often to the same theme. I think I must have fallen in love then.

Lucie entered the room with a tray. The room was quiet, and I could hear the sounds of sipping and blowing across the hot tea. I leaned back from the heating vent, tropically warm. I opened the window on the hour and let the peal of bells drift in.

While my father talked, I thought about the operating theater of the medical faculty. A female cadaver with its head shrouded lay greenly sweating formaldehyde on a table with a wobbly leg. The day's discussion was on reproductive diseases, and as the surgeon pointed to the woman's ovaries, I considered how my father's artists must have attended lectures such as these.

Down below, I heard my name.

“Hard work, medicine,” Rose said.

“Oh-ho, not for Max. Things come easily to that boy,” Father lied. I fished my heavy textbook out from underneath the sofa where I had thrown it, blew the dust off its cover, and tried to study for the next day's class. The names of the bones in the skull slid around on the page each time I looked away, trying to re-create the picture in my mind.

When I heard my father's chair scrape back from his desk, I looked through the heating vent again. “Shall I speak with your son?” Rose asked.

“No, no,” Father sang. “Valves, veins, tendons, hospitals, and moaning invalids, those are his passions. He prefers the morgue to the museum.”

I stood at the top of the stairs while my father and Mademoiselle
Clément commented on the rain outside. Rose said she was unprepared for this weather. Thinking of Humphrey Bogart, I descended the stairs and offered to accompany the young woman to her destination.

“My gallant son, Max.” Father's mustache twitched. “May I introduce to you the lovely Mademoiselle Rose Clément.” I took her hand in mine and she looked at the floor through a fan of black lashes. She was a woman as Ingres would have painted her: luminous skin, impossibly long limbs, and hair so fine it never stayed in its combs but found its maddening way to the sticky corners of her mouth. Her blouse revealed the bracket shape of her collarbone, and I imagined the white, lacy brassiere, with all its complicated hooks and straps, beneath.

“You could walk me as far as the Métro,” Rose offered. “I've some distance to go underground after that.”

She shook hands with my father, bending slightly at the waist. I plucked an umbrella from its stand and jabbed the tip out onto the street. It opened with the sound of a sail catching wind. Rose stepped under. As we walked the ten paces to the corner, rain ran down my collar.

“So you're the infamous son,” Rose said.

Unsure how to respond, I lit a cigarette. She took one as well. The smoke hung low under the umbrella.

“What is amiss here? I don't mean to offend you when we've only just met. I like you instinctively. I have a good sense about people. Like a collie. It's rather clear there's a family
situation
, and even though I'd give anything to work with your father—to work with a legend—it seems like it could be a minefield, too. I don't need any job that badly. I could keep working at the Louvre and eating my two tins of beans for supper.”

“Only beans?” I asked, trying to steer the conversation from my father.

“Unless I've been asked to dinner or I visit my aunt, who feeds me like I'm going into hibernation. Well, sometimes it's a can of beans and a can of soup with the cheese that I keep out on the windowsill. It's a dream come true. A freezing garret on Île Saint-Louis with a
bathroom down the hall that I share with a constipated waiter and a nymphomaniac. I don't have an oven, and it wouldn't be much good if I did. It's a struggle to convince myself to heat the beans.”

Our shoulders jostled against each other as we tried to avoid colliding with a mother pushing a pram. Rose shifted her body so that it was directly in front of mine under the expanse of the umbrella. I could have kissed the curve of her neck.

“Truly,” Rose continued, “why would anyone not want to inherit his gallery? It's breathtaking. And lucrative beyond my wildest dreams. A goose that lays golden eggs.”

“No idea,” I said. She looked skeptical.

“He doesn't think I'm cut out for it. I don't have the eye, the taste, the memory, the savoir faire.” I ticked each trait off on a finger. The way Rose fixed her eyes on me made it hard to fit words together. “They corralled me into medical school. They want me to be a pediatrician, but I've failed at least one exam every semester, and I would have been expelled long ago if there weren't so few pupils left. We'll be halfway through this century by the time I'm finished. I'm not much of a student and don't try to be one.”

“That,” Rose said, “is a tired cliché, and surely there is some nice dark psychological explanation for your deliberate failure.” Although I was slightly uncomfortable with my psychological state as the topic of conversation, I was happy for anything that would keep her attention. “You know Ivan Benezet?” she asked. I nodded and pictured the back of the Breton student's neck, his reddish hair and gingery freckles, the broad shoulders, and his shirt stretched across them. “He's in your medical class.”

Despite his size, or perhaps due to it, Benezet was a mild-mannered fellow. Though he did not know my name, he had invited me to several student outings. I never attended any.

I could guess his importance by the way she mentioned him. “Is he your boyfriend?” I asked. Rose nodded. “Lucky chap,” I said.

She shook her head and colored. “You could tell him that.”

“I would,” I said, “but then I'd have to start going to Basics of Surgery again. I don't have the stomach for it.”

“Ivan loves that class,” Rose said. We laughed for no reason and then fell quiet, surprised by our loud voices under the humid umbrella. A trolley rolled by, bell clanging.