A Fine Imitation (4 page)

Vera awoke to find Arthur's side of the bed cold and smooth. When he got home after she went to bed, he would usually sleep in one of the spare rooms rather than disturb her. She found him at the table in the dining room, dressed for work in a tweed suit. When she saw him like that, with his broad shoulders and black curls, she thought how formidable he must look to any rival. Like a nobleman visiting from the age of chivalry. He turned his ice-blue eyes from his newspaper to her when she entered.

“Good morning,” he said. His mahogany-dark voice commanded attention, even in the noisiest room.

“Good morning, dear. Long night?” Vera settled into the chair next to him and pulled her dressing gown tighter over her chest.

“Very long. Negotiating contracts with the Wilhelm group.”

“I hope you at least ate a little something.”

He smiled, but quickly turned his attention back to the financial page. “I did, thank you.”

“I worry about you being out so late.” She leaned in, hoping to catch his gaze again. “That's the third night this week. And tomorrow you're off to Chicago…when does your train leave? I could go down to the station with you, we could have a little lunch before you go.”

“I wouldn't think of it. Interrupting your schedule like that.”

She reached for a piece of toast and took a small bite of the corner. “It's no trouble.”

He turned the page. “I have some notes to review for the meeting. Some other time.”

She did not want to risk being a nuisance by pressing him. They ate the rest of the meal in silence, except for the brush of the paper on the table and the rattle of china. After his second cup of coffee, Arthur excused himself, kissing her lightly on the top of her head before going. The cool tang of his aftershave hovered above her long after he had departed. Vera closed her eyes and took a deep breath, enjoying the tingle of the scent in her nose.

After the driver took Arthur to work, he returned for Vera. Her schedule had been open that morning, allowing her to get the gallery visit for her mother out of the way before lunch with the ladies. She gave George the directions, and he maneuvered the Packard into the flow of traffic.

When they arrived, Vera almost missed the entrance to the gallery. The door was narrow with no awning, wedged between a large bank and a restaurant patio. She was within two feet of the entrance before she could see the small black sign. The white lettering read
M. FLEMING: FINE ART
, the only clue that she was in the correct place. Though she knew the signage must have been temporary while Fleming was setting up shop, the place had an air of exclusivity. One had to know the gallery was there to find it.

She pushed the door open to reveal a long room with shining hardwood floors and a few framed paintings on the right-hand wall. The smell of lacquer and the gleaming white walls gave the old building a fresh, renovated feel. A pretty, dark-haired woman sat behind a desk against the left wall, and she stood when Vera entered. A quick shock pinched Vera's nerves. She wanted to turn and walk right back through the door, but she stood still, willing herself to look calm. The woman looked just past Vera's shoulder, her eyes indifferent.

“May I help you?” she asked.

“I'm looking for Mr. Fleming,” Vera said, her voice measured. “Is he in?”

“He is. May I tell him who's here?”

Vera waited a beat. “Mrs. Arthur Bellington. I'm here on behalf of my mother.”

The woman cocked an eyebrow. “Of course. Please, make yourself comfortable.” She crossed the long room to a door in the back wall and disappeared.

But Vera now felt deeply uncomfortable, a slow heaviness settling in the pit of her stomach. She distracted herself by examining the room. A handful of sculptures stood in a tight crowd in the corner, as though they were deep in conversation. Vera stepped closer to one of the paintings, a still life with a white vase of daisies on a gingham tablecloth. Nice, clean lines. Competent, but nothing notable. The display work must have been intended for the casual shopper looking to decorate the walls of an office or bank. More valuable works would be kept in the back, viewed by request only.

A sound from the far corner of the room startled Vera, but it was not the woman who had greeted her. A man emerged alone, as short and round as his gallery was long and thin. His mustache obscured his lips, and he had combed what was left of his hair over his scalp.

“Can I help you?” he asked, smoothing the strands of hair with his palm.

The flat sound of his vowels surprised Vera. She had expected someone with a gallery in Paris to be French, but this man was New York by way of the Bowery. Still, you never knew where the connoisseurs would come from these days. “Are you Mr. Fleming?” she asked.

“I am.” He adjusted the small spectacles he wore on the bridge of his nose. “Mrs. Bellington, was it?”

“Yes. My mother, Mrs. Joseph Longacre, sent me to see you about a painting.”

His face lit up. “Yes, Mrs. Bellington. I'm sorry, I should have known. I spoke to your mother again this morning.” He thought for a moment. “Bellington…is that the Angelus Bellingtons, by any chance?”

“Yes.” She could not be surprised. Arthur's reputation always preceded her.

“Well, welcome. Nice to meet you.” He offered her the hand he had been using to slick the hair on his scalp. His palm glistened in the beam of light from the single window. He must have imagined that the pomade gave him a sophisticated polish, but failed to realize it would come off on everything he touched. Vera took the tips of his fingers in hers and let go quickly.

“The painting Mrs. Longacre asked about is in the storage room. Just arrived, but I've had it framed.” He started for the corner he had appeared from, waving at her to follow him. “Good walnut frame. I can add it into the price.”

“Yes, well, she may want it redone. Who does your framing?” She did not really want to go with him to the back if that was where the woman from the desk had disappeared to, but she followed him anyway.

“I got a guy, all framing is done in-house. Back here, watch your step.” Fleming led her through a door in the back wall. The woman was nowhere to be seen. The room had a high ceiling, like the gallery, and was divided into smaller areas by low plywood partitions. On the far wall, a door opened up to the alley, letting in sunlight and fresh air.

Fleming stopped in front of a canvas, which was covered with a large piece of brown cloth. “Here we are,” he said, pulling the fabric off. “Fantastic, isn't it?”

Vera stepped closer, inspecting the work. A blond girl sat at a table composing a letter in a shaft of pale light. She was in three-quarter profile, and the shading in the background made objects against the far wall difficult to distinguish. The use of shadow and light was spot-on. The painting looked a bit worn, but the texture and richness of detail were apparent. “Vermeer? I've never seen this one before,” she said.

Fleming beamed. “It was lost, very few records of it. Turned up in the south of France after the war. Painted around 1667, by my consultant's guess.”

“I see.” Vera studied the girl's skirt. The painting's composition did suggest Vermeer. And yet…

Wood clattered behind Vera, and she jumped. She turned to the source of the noise, which had come from behind one of the plywood partitions, but saw nothing. Had the woman from the front been watching them? Fleming also turned to the sound, a deep frown darkening his features. He stepped between Vera and the space where the sound had come from, plastering on a cheery smile.

“Sorry, that's my framer. I told him if he breaks one more, he's out of here.” He clapped his hands together. “So? Should I wrap it up for Mrs. Longacre? Where would she like it delivered?”

Vera glanced at the painting again, then started for the door back to the gallery. “Thank you for showing me. I'll tell her I saw it.”

He blocked her path. “But what did you think?”

“Excuse me?”

Fleming looked at her over his glasses. “I need to know if she wants to buy. This is a very special piece. I have a number of potential buyers lined up. If she wants the painting, she'll have to jump.”

She shook her head. “I have to say no. I don't think my mother will be buying. Sorry to have wasted your time.”

“But why not?”

Vera cleared her throat, unwilling to have this discussion. “Surely you know.”

“I promise you, Mrs. Bellington, my consultant in Paris would know if this wasn't the real McCoy. He's an expert.” Fleming extended a hand back toward the front room. “Would you like to see the letter from the gentleman who sold it to me? The Duke of Aarschot, he has such a good eye. Fascinating man. Knows more about Vermeer than Vermeer's wife did, I'd wager.”

She smiled, cold and tight. “And I can assure you, I know a few things myself. So sorry, I really must go. I'm late for an engagement.”

He made a few false starts, then let out a sigh of genuine pain. “Okay. But she's missing out.”

“I'm sure one of your other buyers will be delighted to take her place.” Vera turned for the door. “Good-bye, Mr. Fleming.”

When she walked out onto the sidewalk, she found her car idling at the curb. The driver held the door open for her, and she got in, relieved to have left without seeing Fleming's secretary again. She pushed the woman from her mind to concentrate on what had bothered her about the painting.

Once she was alone with her thoughts, the error was immediately clear. Though almost every detail was immaculate, down to the choice of scene and subtle flecks of color in the shadows, the blue was wrong. Vermeer's blues were deep and bold, and had a quality that could be detected even after centuries of fading or mishandling. This blue was too high, too light. A robin's-egg blue, not cobalt, and it could not be attributed to anything natural like sun damage. The painting had been aged to perfection, so it did not look new, and the difference was subtle enough to fool a less trained eye. Most of Fleming's customers likely only cared that the art they bought matched the drapes in the sitting room and sounded impressive. And the forgery was pristine, done by someone with deep knowledge. Even a gallery owner could be forgiven for missing the error, especially since Vermeer himself was such a mystery. She would be hard-pressed to prove the painting was a forgery, so the thought of reporting it to anyone made no sense. Someone would no doubt be made very happy by the painting, no matter what its origin.

Once she had settled the matter of the painting, the face of the woman at the desk intruded on Vera's thoughts once more. She recognized her instantly, of course, as she had the other times she had spotted her around the city. Once at a museum, once at a restaurant. Most recently she had been at an auction, clinging to the arm of a well-dressed gentleman twice her age. The brief conversation in the gallery had been the first time she and Vera had so much as acknowledged each other in all those coincidental meetings, however. Their polite back-and-forth at Fleming's had finally allowed Vera to get a good look, to see that her hair was still as black as Vera's, her eyes still a vibrant blue. But some of the pink had faded from her cheeks, and time had chilled her warm demeanor.

Vera had honestly not expected to have any occasion to exchange words with her again. Not with Bea Stillman. Not after the heartbreak that had passed between them on that cold November weekend so many years ago.

Vera crossed the quad, the early fall air tempting her nose with the smell of leaves and smoke. She mentally rehearsed the terms and definitions for the day's test, even though she'd been over them a thousand times since rolling over under her quilt before dawn that morning.

Bea ran up and fell into step beside her. “Honestly, if they're going to insist on having these classes every day, I'm not sure I'll be able to keep this up.”

“Don't be silly,” Vera said, her mind still on vocabulary. “It's your junior year. They had classes at Agnes Scott. You're used to it by now.”

“Used to something and delighted by something are two entirely different states.” Bea yawned, stretching a hand over her head. “I want to show you something after class.”

“It's not another passage from
What a Young Woman Ought to Know
, is it? I hate to spoil the fun, but I already knew most of those things.” Vera tossed a wry look over her shoulder as she slid down the aisle to her preferred seat.

“No, it's not that.” Bea dropped into her seat, letting her books scatter across the desktop. She turned to beam at Vera. “I made you something.”

“What?”

“It's a little trifle, really a little nothing. Can you come by my room?”

Vera smiled. “Of course. We'll go right after class.”

Vera labored over the test, ink smudging her fingers as she wrote, crossed out, and rewrote. She couldn't help but notice from the corner of her eye that Bea wasn't taking the same approach. Bea filled in the blanks on the right side of the page, one after the other, with an air of something like boredom. Vera took care not to read the answers themselves, but she saw that the first letter of each word looped and swirled with embellishments under Bea's pen. Vera forced her attention back to her own test paper, wondering whether Bea was concentrating harder on the artistry of her penmanship than the accuracy of her responses.

Vera left the classroom with the same washed-out-and-emptied feeling tests always gave her but had confidence her time studying had paid off. Bea talked the whole way to her dorm, though she never said a word about the test. In her room, she took Vera's hand and guided her to the desk chair.

“Now, close your eyes,” Bea said.

“This is a lot of ceremony for ‘a little nothing,' ” Vera said, but complied with the request.

“You can't see anything?”

“Nothing at all.”

Bea ignored this, placing something feather-light in Vera's lap. “Now, open!”

Vera opened her eyes to find a scroll of paper tied with a rose-colored ribbon. She pulled the ribbon off and unrolled the page. A gasp escaped her. “Where did you get this?”

Bea sank, satisfied, onto the dress-covered bed. “I told you, I made it.”

“You never did. How did you…Bea, it's remarkable.”

The drawing on the paper was so vivid, so clean, it looked as though someone had taken a photograph of the
Bon Ton
magazine cover it was meant to mimic. And yet, it was sharper somehow, each line so even and resolute it seemed one of them might slice right through the thin paper. The girl's black hat and bright yellow coat looked like they would be starchy and stiff under Vera's fingers, though she knew they would only be smooth paper. She had seen Bea's doodles and sketches in the margins of her notebooks, and of course they had discussed their favorite works and artists in class, but Vera had no idea Bea had such genuine talent.

“You did this from memory?” Vera said when she found her voice.

Bea waved her off. “No, Catherine Allston had a copy of the magazine in her room. She let me borrow it.”

“This is beautiful. I love it. Thank you.”

“I'm so glad you like it. It took me positively forever, but you were so upset when the other got torn. I wanted you to have a replacement. Though if Catherine were tempted at all by treats, I might have gotten the real thing off her.”

“I like it better than the real thing, truly.” Vera traced a line with her finger. “You should have gone to art school, Bea. Somewhere with a real studio program. Why didn't you?”

A cloud crossed Bea's face for an instant, then was replaced by a smirk. “Are you trying to say you wish I hadn't come to Vassar?”

Vera laughed. “Of course not. But you're very good. You must have studied drawing more seriously at some point.”

The brightness in Bea's eyes dimmed. “Oh, Vera. None of it matters anyway, does it?”

“None of what matters?”

Bea cocked her head. “None of…this.” She gestured to the books piled on the desk. “School. College.”

“Of course it matters,” Vera said, the words clipped. “We ought to do our best.”

Bea sat quiet. She picked at some lace on the bedspread, no longer meeting Vera's eyes. “I always thought all your studying, all that work…I thought it was like your room. Everything where it belongs, even the right answers in the right spaces. That you had to do well because it was who you were. Because it was expected of you.” She looked up, the corners of her mouth pulled down. “But it's important to you, isn't it? That you learn it. That you know it.”

Vera studied the drawing spread across her skirt. “It isn't to you?” She knew the answer before the question left her mouth, but she didn't know what else to say.

“Well, we're going to be wives, aren't we?” Bea said, her voice falsely bright. “It's not as if we're planning to be teachers or curators. We don't have to do any of that.” She scooted to the edge of the bed and took Vera's hands. “We'll have our lovely lunches in the city and dinner parties and trips to the shore. We'll have big households to manage. That'll be far better, won't it?”

“But I know you get good grades, I've seen them.” Vera plowed through Bea's sunny version of their future, more curious than ever about the disconnect between Bea's sloppy study habits and her good marks.

“Please don't worry about it.” Bea dropped Vera's hands. “Let's just say I have a system.”

The answer clicked into place. “You're cheating?” Vera asked. Bea opened and closed her mouth. When she didn't answer, Vera said, “Tell me the truth. You wouldn't cheat, would you?”

“Don't be cross with me. I never meant it to be a lie. When we first met, I assumed you knew, and then it got harder and harder to tell you. So I didn't. Everyone does it,” Bea said, her voice taking on a pleading tone. At a hard look from Vera, she held her hands up in defeat. “Not everyone, no. But who's it hurting? Not you. And I don't go for top grades, just enough to keep me here.”

“But how?”

Bea examined her fingernails. “Girls who've taken a course give me old tests, old essays. I make them things in exchange. Drawings, that sort of thing. I give Professor Harrison an essay he's probably accepted ten times, and he gives me a B. It's easy enough.”

“Why even come to college then?” Vera asked.

“To make friends. To have a good time before I'm an old married lady.” Her answer rang false to Vera, but Bea did not elaborate. “Speaking of which, I have another surprise for you.” Bea leaned forward, a hopeful gleam in her eyes.

“I don't know if I can take another surprise.”

Bea blinked hard and leaned in. “Please, Vera, you're not surprised. You must have known I couldn't be doing as well as I am. You've dressed me down more than once for leaving an assignment to the last minute.”

Vera had to admit that was true. She'd seen Bea's study habits—or lack thereof—firsthand. Had she really been willfully blind? It was a distinct possibility, and one she didn't like pondering. Still, she didn't want to fight with her friend about something she knew she wouldn't be able to change.

“And you did like the first surprise, right?” Bea tapped the drawing.

Vera's shoulders relaxed. “Yes.”

“All right then.” Bea sat up straight, her eyes shining once more. “You'll love this one, I promise you.”

Vera looked around. “Is it in this room? Do I have to close my eyes again?”

Bea lowered her voice to a hush. “Get ready, Miss Longacre. I'm bringing you some boys.”