Pictures at an Exhibition (23 page)

“In November, after the liberation, we formed the Commission de Récupération artistique, the CRA, of which I am the secretary, naturally, as I am its sole woman.” For a moment, the old humor crept into her voice.

Rose explained that her work depleted her entirely, and that she often dreamed that she was buried in sand. As she choked, she envisioned her lungs glittering with the pigments of paintings, gold leaf, and lazulite from Badakhshan. To the Rothschilds had been returned their Vermeers. Yet what of the rest? They had been hidden in salt mines, in caves, in châteaux, in underground bunkers, in banks. The
Americans’ art recuperation corps—dubbed the Monuments Men—predicted that, in coming decades, much would be found in America, home to the new millionaires. “At night,” Rose said, “when I am unable to sleep, I repeat to myself,
Mon action après l'ERR n'avait pas été inutile.
My actions were not useless.

“You should end this rift with your parents, Max,” she said. “Go to Le Puy You never know when they will die.”

She touched her ear and its pearl jewel, opened her door, called the elevator, and waited with her back to me. We parted, she turned. I watched her face rise above me as the elevator descended. I stood outside for a while on the stoop. I felt indistinct, distant from the street, the parked cars, the dead bird by the gutter, and the flapping blue awnings. Had she said I was not myself without my father?

I could no longer remember if I had asked Rose for one more name, for the name that would lead me, at least, at last, to
Almonds.
But I knew she would have refused. As I left her room, I had let my gaze drop—it did so unconsciously and of its own volition—to the sheaf on the nearest stack of documents. The word
CAILLEUX
leaped out. I knew it but could not recall its origins.

I opened Father's address book and found Cailleux on rue Washington, the same gallery that had sold the Matisse forgeries in March 1939, before the war. If at the time I felt a pang of guilt over betraying Rose, I quelled it with my conviction that a discovery was close at hand.

I had been standing on the street for an indeterminate amount of time. I watched the red flickering light of the radio transmitter atop the Eiffel Tower as it spread news, predicted the weather, damned the politicians, and warned airplanes of a metal spire in the clouds. I thought of Bertrand. I had grown accustomed to missing him.

Chapter Eighteen

T
HE CLOUDS THAT MAY NIGHT LOOKED LIKE
dendrites—a word and image that floated to the surface of my mind from the glossy page of a long-neglected textbook. As I neared the Parc de Monceau, scraps of a dream I had had early that morning returned to me: I was running through the park with another child, hiding in the shiny leaves of the rhododendrons, hand attached to sticky hand. The dream memory of running quickened my pace until, with a leap, I had to step back up on the curb to avoid a car.
Il a brûlé un stop.

I tried not to think of Rose, or of the peevish exchange with Chaim when I returned home. We were seated at the table, drinking the end of our twice-used coffee grounds. “Today is our last day's worth of food, Max,” Chaim said. He had threatened this before and it had not been so; I suppose I was dismissive of him.

I shook my head to clear it. A veteran from the Guerre de Qua-torze roasting fragrant chestnuts shared the street corner with me. The smell, and the sound of the heavy nuts falling into a customer's brown paper bag, was pleasant, and my spirits lifted. Above us, a soprano practiced an aria, and the veteran stopped scraping at his tin tray to listen. She sang Puccini,
“Chi il bel sogno di Doretta,”
from
La rondine.
Her voice soared upward between two impossibly high notes and seemed to join the sudden wind that swirled, swooped down the
street, and snatched a newspaper from a man's hands. The traffic light changed and the cars rushed forward with their loud
shushing
sound. Mother said Mussolini ruined Puccini for her by giving the oration at the composer's funeral, and my father said he didn't care.

I turned onto rue Washington, where two women hastened in opposite directions from the doors of the Cailleux Gallery. The sun had dropped from sight, but its low rays made the steep mansard rooftops glint like the rubbed tip of a pencil. The gallery's sleepy yellow glow, too, suggested that some evening festivities were dwindling.

I pushed open the door to find a teetering, red-faced man gripping a bottle of champagne. “We don't have any glasses left, so you'll have to drink out of this!” he shouted, and tried to embrace me, though I ducked out of his grasp. This was Mr. Cailleux, the gallery's owner.

“Don't expect to buy anything because it's all been sold, sold, sold!”

I edged past his enormous girth, out of the entryway and into the room. I had not been to a gallery opening in five years, but the smells were the same: toxic fresh paint, sweat in wool suits, acrid cigarettes, wine, and Roquefort cheese. I scanned the twenty or so canvases before me and saw a red dot—sold—beneath each painting. One wall was Cocteau: thin, whimsical drawings and portraits by the opium addict. Ten Gustave Cariot studies of Notre-Dame borrowed Monet's trick of painting cathedrals at different times of day. Cariot's Notre-Dame was wan and sandy at 9:30 a.m. By four in the evening, the church was as pink as your tongue with a sky as green as grass. Two couples lingered by a table filled with empty wine bottles.

Underneath
Notre-Dame, Vue du Port aux Vins, 1 heure de l'après-midi
were a pair of round sofas, red like the divans in my father's lost gallery. On one, beneath a cloud of cigarette smoke, lounged two women, each with her legs crossed toward the other, their limbs nearly intertwined. The darker of the two was shoeless, and a girl with her same complexion scuffed the floor between the sofas, shuffling in her mother's too-large high heels.

“Tesoro”
said the barefoot woman, her eyes thickly lined in kohl, laughing as I started. “And who are you, with your pretty face and big eyes? Are you wanting to buy Bernard's paintings, too?”

“No—yes. But I was told they are all sold. My aunt had wanted to come herself, but she is suffering from bunions so she sent me instead.”

“And who is your aunt?” The woman flexed her stockinged foot and smiled at me.

“Claudine de La Porte des Vaux.”

“Then come over here,” shouted Cailleux. “You can settle a bet for us. It's two against two, and you'll be our deciding vote.”

“But he doesn't know anything.” The speaker had a nasal voice and a beard pointed like a spruce tree. He made a tent out of his fingers and flexed them back and forth.

“No, no, his aunt is Claudine de La Porte des Vaux, a marvelous art dealer,” Cailleux told the bearded one.
And very rich
, he mouthed. The two remaining couples kissed the women good-bye.
“Buona notte, congratulazioni, arrivederci
,“ they called from the hallway.

Mr. Cailleux had rolls of fat on his forehead where another man might have had wrinkles. He wore a gold ring on his first finger, which he kept jabbing into the bearded man's chest. He wheezed while he spoke.

“We're talking about the bad old days,” said an American in golfer's clothes. “Back when Cailleux was thin and hungry!” He gestured at our host with his glass. Its ice cubes clinked merrily.

“Listen to Mike,” the barefoot woman cried, pronouncing the golfer's name
meek.
“Now you are too fat even to go sailing!”

“Haw-haw!”
Mike laughed like a donkey. “Too fat to go sailing!”

A fourth man did not speak but stared at me from behind black-rimmed glasses. I tried not to look at him. Had we known each other? He rubbed his bald head over and over, thinking, I worried, of the same thing.

Cailleux turned to me. “Listen carefully. I say there were four great art dealers before the war: Berenzon, Paul Rosenberg, Wilden-stein, and one other. I was one of the petit greats, yes, but not of the same grand tradition. Not yet!” He puffed at his Gauloise quickly, as
if to indicate his excitement. “No one can remember the name of the fourth. Mike will pay whoever can come up with it. Or maybe Oskar will.” Mike looked over at the bald man, who was busy cleaning his glasses. The bald man returned the glasses to his face and squinted at me.

“David-Weill?” the bearded man offered.

“No, he was a collector, old boy. Try again.”

“We have ten thousand francs resting on this,” Mike the golfer told me, grabbing my elbow. “You've got to remember the name of the fourth. You've just got to.”

I didn't understand their bet, nor did I really want to help these men. But the question was too easy. I couldn't resist showing off. I imagined the Bernheims’ salon: two purple and crimson tapestries running the length of the walls; the black marble fireplace with its veins of mica; the Lipschitz andirons in the shape of coiled snakes; the display case in the corner, lightly covered in dust; the too-soft leather couches; the hordes of children in varying states of undress. “Could it have been Bernheim-Jeune?” I furrowed my brow.

“Jesus Christ, ten thousand francs!” Mike shouted in English. “Oskar, pour this young man a whisky.” Bald Oskar lumbered to the bar. Mike thumped me on the back.

There were more paintings in the gallery's hallway and antechamber. I wanted to stand and examine them, to look for the clue Rose had recorded. I made as if to leave, but Cailleux grabbed me by the wrist. He didn't seem to have noticed that he'd just lost a bet. An idiotic grin stretched across his drunken features.

“Did you know the Bernheim-Jeunes?” I surprised myself by asking.

“Sure,” said Cailleux. “Here, hold this.” He handed me his cigarette while he reached in his lapel pocket for some pills.

“What about Wildenstein?”

“Good riddance,” he said, with the pills on his tongue. He took a slug of whisky.

“And Berenzon?”

“Daniel Berenzon,” he said with relish. “Did I know him!”

“Who didn't,” sneered the bearded man.

“Did you like him?” I asked, still holding the cigarette.

“Who could like him?” said the bearded man.

“But who couldn't?
Un momento
, who gave you that?” Cailleux asked, and I handed the Gauloise back. He gestured for the little girl to come to him, and she shuffled over in her mother's shoes. He lifted her onto his lap, and she reached into his lapel pocket and took out a lighter.

“At first Berenzon was so cocksure, a bastard,” the bald man said, glancing at me.

“Slipped Matisse away from Bernheim,” Mike added.

“Like a bride from her garters—”

“It wasn't nice,” Cailleux sang. The daughter began to flick the lighter on and off.

“Oh, no, it wasn't nice.”

“But it was brilliant.”

“His timing was impeccable.”

“Like a Swiss watch.”

Cailleux leaned back and snatched the lighter out of his daughter's hand and smoked another Gauloise. He stared at the end of the cigarette. “Matisse was tired of the Bernheim brothers. He had begun a new phase, in the Oriental mood, and they weren't selling, until Berenzon put one up in his window and it was a smashing success.”

They fell quiet.

“Remember that wife of Berenzon's?” The golfer asked. He reached over my legs for the bottle of Glenfiddich and made a low moaning noise. My eye started to twitch, and I raised my fingers to its lid to stop the spasms. A repugnant two-second image played in my mind in which I saw the golfer, in his white varsity sweater with the green V collar, atop my struggling mother.

“Oh, you have no idea, young man,” Cailleux said to me. “What a face. A thousand ships. Troy could have happened all over again.”

“And not just a face.” The bald man wiggled his hips. When I met his eyes, he snarled.

“That Berenzon wooed her—”

“Like every other man in Paris rich enough—”

“Even Cailleux asked Eva out for dinner.” The golfer laughed.

“And I was already married!”

At this, the tanned woman glared from the other sofa. She unclipped her earrings with two noisy clicks and spoke in rapid Italian to her friend. My mind raced to find an excuse to look at the paintings or to join the two women.

“Berenzon wasn't afraid to take on a Jew—”

“Berenzon was a Jew, too!”

“Who wasn't a Jew then, in this business? They were everywhere.”

“A Jew, though not a cheap one.”

“But crafty.”

Cailleux dropped a hand, heavy as a paw, on my knee. “Berenzon visited this very gallery once, long ago
—1938
, maybe. Right before I had a show of Utrillos. Strolled in behind some workmen even though there were curtains up in the windows. He sauntered over to my desk, picked up the price list, and read right through it. I was so angry! I almost taught him a lesson right there. But listen to this: Berenzon said I was underselling the Utrillos. If I didn't make them more expensive, no one would want them and I wouldn't make any money or pay off my gambling debts.” He sucked at his teeth. “I don't know how he knew about those debts.”

“I didn't know you had them,” said the golfer.

“Not anymore. That show got me, as you say”—Cailleux turned to him and switched to English—”out of the red.”

“Berenzon's wife was barred from the casinos,” the golfer replied.

“She had a gambling problem?” Cailleux asked. “Cheated at poker? Counted cards?”

“I know the story,” I said. I told them about the thirty-seven slots on the roulette wheel that my mother could envision as keys on the piano. I described her mountain of casino chips, the cheering crowd, and the unhappy portly owner. My mother had recommended he install fans to distort the wheel's perfect pitch. We were given his white car and its chauffeur for the day. Did it really happen? It seemed as far away as the memory of a childhood dream.

“That's ridiculous,” sneered the bearded man.

“Well, it's true,” I replied.

“How do you know?” the bald man asked.

“I heard it from my aunt.”