Restoration (9 page)

“Baton Rouge?” Rhys said.

“I can spot you people a mile away.”

“What people?”

“You know what people.” He paused, wiped the sweat off his face. “You’re inspectors with the government, aren’t you?”

“Inspectors?” Rhys said. “Why would you say we’re inspectors?”

“And why would you want to torment Miss Wheeler?” he shot back. “You oughta be ashamed. You really should.”

“What are you talking about?” I said. “We’ve never even met Miss Wheeler. How can you torment somebody you don’t know?”

He started mopping again. He erased our prints and reached to where we were standing. It was my impression that he would’ve erased both Rhys and me had he been able to extend his mop that far.

“We’re not them,” Rhys said. “I swear to God we’re not them.”

“You look like them.”

“Listen to me,” she said. “We heard this building was once a post
office and we came today because we’re curious to learn more about it. That’s all. We’re amateur historians who appreciate fine old architecture. We were doing research and we read about the building in some newspaper clippings in a museum archive. The truth is, we came to snoop around. We’re snoops, all right? I’m not ashamed to say it.”

He was looking at her the same way I was. It was a look that communicated as much bewilderment as amusement.

She stepped up closer to him, leaving more tracks. “We’re no more the government than you are,” she said. “And I think you know that. Why would inspectors be coming around here, anyway?”

“That ain’t my place to say.”

“Do you have a name?”

“I never met ‘em.”

“I meant your name.”

“Cherry,” he said. “Rondell Cherry.” He put the headphones back on. “Go see what you want, just keep me out of it.”

We walked past him and entered the room with all the chairs and slowly made our way to the center. The only light came from a couple of fluorescent panels high up on the ceiling. Although it was dark in the room it didn’t take long to locate the mural. It was right where it should have been. That is to say, it was directly in front of us, some ten feet off the ground, and up above a run of mirrors and sinks for washing hair. The canvas, though covered with paint, was a different texture than the wood paneling and drywall that built out the rest of the room.

I glanced over at Rhys. I might’ve anticipated the tears, but not the intensity of her crying jag. The woman wept. She wept just as those young women probably had wept sixty years before at the House of Bultman when Levette Asmore’s empty coffin was laid out with a single magnolia flower on the lid.

“You want a Kleenex or a handkerchief or something?” I said.

She shook her head.

The paint covering the mural—corn yellow streaked with dirt and water stains—also covered the rest of the room. The painting itself, from what I could see of the outline, was about the size of a small outdoor
billboard. The corners were curling and in other areas bubbles were lifting on the surface. A couple of air-conditioning vents had been cut into the canvas and one of the vents had leaked. You could also see seams running between each of the four panels.

“He used some kind of glue, probably wallpaper paste, and tacks,” Rhys said. “See the tacks running along the edge? They just painted right over them, too.”

“It’s really there, isn’t it?”

“It really is,” she said.

I supposed you could look at any wall with nothing on it and see the same thing, but the space possessed a power that was unexpected. The power came from imagining the image that resided beneath the grime and paint, the one Asmore had put there.

Wholly unprepared for any voice but Rhys’s, I jumped when one sounded a few feet behind us. “That used to be a picture,” Rondell Cherry said.

“What was a picture?” Rhys said, making sure to keep her back to him. I had to give it to her: she was good, she could turn it off as quickly as she turned it on.

“That place up there on the wall,” Cherry said.

“No kidding?” And still not even a sniffle.

“The beauty school’s been here thirty-one years, that’s since 1970, and before that they had an insurance agency here. The insurance people bought it after the old post office moved and the government sold the building, and they were the ones that redid all the insides like you see here. They had all their desks in this room. It was one of the insurance people who told the Wheelers about the painting.”

“My name is Rhys Goudeau,” Rhys said, offering him a hand to shake. “And this is my friend Jack Charbonnet.”

He nodded at us both.

“You been working here long, Mr. Cherry?”

“I started in ’87. I’ll make fifteen years next January.”

“You really think there’s a picture under there?” Rhys said. “When did Mrs. Wheeler tell you that?”

“Oh, whenever it came to her, I guess, a long time ago. I never knew her to lie. On top of that, we had some new air ducts put in and the electrician had to cut bigger vents. He made his cuts and I took out my pocketknife and scraped off the paint that covered the piece of board and cloth and whatnot and you could see it was something under there. Just too bad it’s all ruined.”

“What sort of person is Mrs. Wheeler?”

“What sort of person?”

“Yes, what sort? Is she a nice lady? A good lady?”

“Miss Wheeler is an
interesting
lady, let me put it to you that way. We get along handsomely and always have, since day one. Also, I think she’s very funny. She likes to keep you laughing.”

“What about Mr. Wheeler?”

“Mr. Wheeler passed away from a stroke or a heart attack, something like that.”

“Does Mrs. Wheeler come to the school every day?”

“Yes, she does. Every day up until the bell rings. That is not counting Wednesdays, when people come by after classes to get their hair cut and Miss Wheeler stays late to supervise. She likes to be here in case something happens. We get people getting upset and screaming sometimes, seeing the job the students do, but what you want for three dollars? I mean, come on.” His laughter sounded like an animal running across a tin roof. “You know what I’m saying?”

“I sure do,” said Rhys, adding a laugh of her own. “Mr. Cherry, do you remember the last time this room was painted?”

“The last time it was painted?”

“Yes sir.”

“Only once since I been here.”

“And when was that?”

“Maybe a year after I started. No, it was more like six months. The color before was kind of dark, a kind of blue, and the Wheelers wanted to brighten things up.”

Rondell Cherry seemed to like Rhys and to trust her implicitly, but for some reason he felt differently about me. He looked at me
again the way he had earlier in the lobby. “You one hundred percent positively certain you’re not a government man?”

I took out my wallet and flashed a press credential, the ID card the paper had issued me years ago when I was first hired. It was the wrong thing to show him. “You not intending to write a story about us, are you?”

“I’m not with the paper anymore. I quit a while back.”

“Miss Wheeler like to die she knew I let the
T-P
in here.”

“When you scraped the paint off that piece of cloth from the wall,” Rhys said, “what did you see? What was underneath?”

He looked up at the spot on the wall and pointed. “Came from that vent there. I can’t say it was anything you could make out. It was just some colors that weren’t the blue before it. It was some reds, some greens and some whites.”

“And Mrs. Wheeler will be here Wednesday when people come and volunteer to have their hair cut?”

“Three dollars and they’ll do yours, too. Not that I recommend it.”

Rhys kept staring at the wall and the feeling that had made her weep came over her again and I could see her fighting it, trying to keep it away. A beautiful old post office was now a run-down beauty school. A monumental work of art was painted over, then further desecrated to accommodate air-conditioning vents. The vents were too small, so they’d been replaced with larger ones. The larger ones had leaked. The government was investigating the woman who ran the school. The government would seize the beauty school and once again possess the painting that it had ordered destroyed.

“You’re a very nice man,” Rhys said to Rondell Cherry. “Thank you for accommodating us today.”

She walked out of the room without another word, leaving Rondell Cherry and me to follow. As we were heading down the hallway he stopped and grabbed me by a sleeve. “Listen,” he said with a tug, “you sure you’re not a government man?”

Rhys was quiet on the drive back to the French Quarter. I noticed her hands shaking as she held the wheel. She would look at me and start to speak, then stop herself. At an intersection she braked to a complete stop even though the light was green. From behind us came car horns and shouted curses. I sat rumbling with laughter. Rhys was oblivious.

“What do we do now?” she muttered, glancing at her reflection in the rearview mirror. “Come on, honey, what do you do?”

“You snap out of it and go,” I replied, then pointed to the signal and slipped lower in the seat.

Rather than return to the parking lot where I’d left my car, she did an illegal U-turn on Poydras Street and headed back Uptown. I said nothing in protest, figuring we were returning to Wheeler for another
look. But she passed the school without slowing or saying anything and drove another mile or so before stopping across from a building that looked like a well-tended warehouse. Painted high on an exterior wall were the words NEAL AUCTION COMPANY. “Hope you didn’t have plans for the evening,” she said.

“Me? Never.”

“I just remembered it’s Thursday night. Do you know what that means?”

“Maybe I did in a previous life but the significance escapes me at the moment.”

“Thursday night is when auction houses in New Orleans traditionally stay open late and host preview parties.”

“You’re taking me to a party, are you? My God, we’re on a date.”

She cut me a nasty look and pushed open her squeaky door. She paused before stepping outside. “No, Jack, this is not a date. This is a preview party, with the emphasis on preview. In New Orleans auctions are held on weekends, and Thursday night is the only time a lot of buyers get a chance to see what’s coming up for sale. Unlike you, Jack, they have real-life commitments like nine-to-five jobs and families and they can’t come here during the day. Neal is the oldest auction business in town, and it specializes in all things southern. It’s where I’m going to recommend Patrick consign
Dorothy.”

As we were crossing the street my body reacted noisily to the smell of fried chicken issuing from the Popeyes on the corner. I hadn’t eaten since breakfast, and the aroma stopped me in my tracks. “I’m starving,” I called out. “Come on, Rhys. My treat.”

She shook her head and waved me on.

“Rhys?
Rhys?”
When she looked back at me I said, “I truly believe I’d sell my soul for a biscuit. That’s how bad it is.”

“How can you think about food when there are paintings so close by?”

Double glass doors, tinted gray and stenciled with the Neal logo, opened into a space that seemed entirely removed from the present. Old rugs layered the gallery’s wood floors, and mirrors and paintings
papered the walls. From the ceiling were suspended crystal chandeliers and vintage light fixtures, some of them ablaze and radiating heat. Antique furniture crowded the large open rooms. The smell of fried chicken now was replaced with those of furniture wax and peppermint oil. People of what seemed a genteel class circulated among the pretty things: men in suits and jackets without ties, women in pearls and neatly pressed outfits. I followed Rhys to an office area in front where jewelry and pottery were displayed in big glass cases. She retrieved a catalog with a label on the cover that said “House Copy.”

“Take this,” she said, and slapped the book against my chest. She then took one for herself.

The cover illustration, wrapping from front to back, showed a painting of a working cotton plantation, its fields crowded with African-American laborers. “Well, I’ll be,” Rhys said. “Check this out, Jack. They’ve got a giant Walker for sale.”

As in the case of A. J. Drysdale, a collection of southern art wasn’t complete without a Walker. “Even my dad the junk-shop picker owned one of these,” I said.

“Get out of here. Your dad had a Walker?”

“He really did. It was small, though, not much bigger than a postcard. It was a portrait of a laborer standing on the edge of a cotton field. A black man.”

“Of course the subject was black. What else would it be? Walker made his name exploiting the image of the poor black.”

“It was just a little picture, Rhys.”

“You’re very naïve,” she said. “Now come. I want to show you something.”

I followed her into the main room of the gallery, where it was so crowded with people and furniture that it was hard to get around. An enormous dining table, not an inch short of fifteen feet long, stood in the center and held magnum bottles of wine and supermarket party trays loaded with vegetable sticks, cold cuts and cheeses. I paused to spear a slice of ham, but in the instant before eating it Rhys yanked me forward. The ham landed on the table with a splat. “God, Jack.
Are you still thinking about food? The Louisiana Room is right over there.”