The Rule of Four (10 page)

So ended the formative period in my father’s life, the single year that set in motion all the clockwork of his future identity. Thinking back on it, I wonder if it isn’t the same for all of us. Adulthood is a glacier encroaching quietly on youth. When it arrives, the stamp of childhood suddenly freezes, capturing us for good in the image of our last act, the pose we struck when the ice of age set in. The three dimensions of Patrick Sullivan, when the cold began to claim him, were husband, father, and scholar. They defined him until the end.

After the theft of the portmaster’s diary, Taft vanished from the story of my father’s life, only to resurface as the gadfly of his career, biting from behind the scholar’s veil. Curry would not be in touch with my father for more than three years, until the occasion of my parents’ wedding. The letter he wrote then was an uneasy thing, dwelling mainly in the shadow of darker days. The first few words offered his congratulations to the bride and groom; everything after was about the
Hypnerotomachia.

Time passed; worlds diverged. Taft, carried by the momentum of those early years, was offered a permanent fellowship at the prestigious Institute for Advanced Study, where Einstein had worked while living near Princeton. It was an honor my father surely envied, and one that freed Taft from all the obligations of a college professor: other than agreeing to advise Bill Stein and Paul, the old bear never suffered another student or taught another class. Curry took a prominent job at Skinner’s Auction House in Boston, and rose on toward professional success. In the Columbus bookshop where my father learned to walk, three new children kept him occupied enough to forget, for a while, that his experience in New York had left a permanent impression. All three men, wedged from each other by pride and circumstance, found surrogates for the
Hypnerotomachia,
ersatz love affairs to stand in for a quest left incomplete. The generational clock ground out another revolution, and time turned friends to strangers. Francesco Colonna, who kept the key that wound the watch, must have thought his secret safe.

Chapter 7
                           

“Which way?” I ask Paul as the library fades behind us.

“Toward the art museum,” he says, hunched over to keep the bundle of cloths dry.

To get there we pass Murray-Dodge, a stony blister of a building in the thick of north campus. Inside, a student theater company is performing Tom Stoppard’s
Arcadia,
the last play Charlie had to read in English 151w, and the first one he and I will see together. We have tickets to Sunday night’s show. Bubbling over the cauldronlike walls of the stage comes the voice of Thomasina, the thirteen-year-old prodigy of the play, who reminded me of Paul the first time I read it.

If you could stop every atom in its position and direction,
she is saying,
and if your mind could comprehend all the actions thus suspended, then if you were really
, really
good at algebra you could write the formula for all the future.

Yes,
stammers her tutor, who is exhausted by the engine of her mind.
Yes, as far as I know, you are the first person to have thought of this.

From a distance, the front entrance to the art museum appears to be open, a small miracle on a holiday night. The museum curators are a strange lot, half of them mousy as librarians, the other half moody as artists, and I get the impression most would rather let kindergartners fingerpaint on the Monets than let an undergrad into the museum when it wasn’t strictly necessary.

McCormick Hall, home of the art history department, sits slightly in front of the museum proper, the wall of its entrance paneled in glass. As we approach, security guards eye us through the fishbowl. Like one of the avant-garde exhibits Katie took me to see, which I never understood, they have all the trappings of being real, but are perfectly, silently motionless. A sign on the door says
MEETING OF PRINCETON ART MUSEUM TRUSTEES
. In smaller letters it adds:
Museum Closed to Public.
I hesitate, but Paul barges in.

“Richard,” he calls out into the main hall.

A handful of patrons turn to gawk, but no familiar faces. Canvases punctuate the walls of the main floor, windows of color in this dreary white house. Reconstructed Greek vases sit on waist-high pillars in a nearby room.

“Richard,”
Paul repeats, louder now.

Curry’s bald head turns on its long, thick neck. He is tall and wiry, wearing a tailored pinstripe suit with a red tie. When he sees Paul walking toward him, the man’s dark eyes are all affection. Curry’s wife died more than ten years ago, childless, and he now looks on Paul as his only son.

“Boys,” he says warmly, extending his arms, as if we are half our ages. He turns to Paul. “I didn’t expect to see you so soon. I thought you wouldn’t be done until later. What a nice surprise.” His fingers are tickling his cuff links, his eyes full of pleasure. He reaches over to shake Paul’s outstretched hand.

“How have you been?”

We both smile. The energy in Curry’s voice belies his age, but in other ways the hounds of time are closing in. Since I last saw him, only six months ago, signs of stiffness have crept into his movements, and the faintest hollow has formed behind the flesh of his face. Richard Curry is the owner of a large auction house in New York now, and the trustee of museums much bigger than this one—but according to Paul, after the
Hypnerotomachia
disappeared from his life, the career that replaced it never became more than a sideline, a campaign to forget what came before. No one seemed more surprised by his success, and less impressed by it, than Curry himself.

“Ah,” he says now, turning as if to introduce us to someone. “Have you seen the paintings?”

Behind him is a canvas I’ve never noticed before. Looking around, I realize the art on the walls is not what’s usually here.

“These aren’t from the university collections,” Paul says.

Curry smiles. “No, not at all. Each of the trustees brought something for tonight. We made a bet to see which one of us could put the most paintings on loan to the museum.”

Curry, the old football player, still has a residue in his speech of wagers and gambles and gentlemen’s bets.

“Who won?” I ask.

“The art museum,” he says, deflecting the question. “Princeton profits when we strive.”

In the silence that follows, he scans the faces of the patrons who haven’t fled the great hall after our interruption.

“I was going to show you this after the trustees’ meeting,” he says to Paul, “but there’s no reason not to do it now.”

He gestures for us to follow him, and begins walking toward a room to the left. I glance at Paul, wondering what he means, but Paul seems not to know.

“George Carter, Sr., brought these two . . .” Curry says, showing us the artwork along the way. Two small prints by Dürer sit in frames so old they have the texture of driftwood. “And the Wolgemut on the far side.” He points across the floor. “The Philip Murrays brought those two very nice Mannerists.”

Curry leads us into a second room, where late-twentieth-century art has been replaced by Impressionist paintings. “The Wilson family brought four: a Bonnat, a small Manet, and two by Toulouse-Lautrec.” He gives us time to study them. “The Marquands added this Gauguin.”

We travel across the main hall, and in the room of antiquities he says, “Mary Knight brought only one, but it’s a very large Roman bust, and she says it may become a permanent donation. Very generous.”

“What about yours?” Paul asks.

Curry has brought us in a great circle through the first floor, back to the original room. “This is mine,” he says, waving his hand.

“Which one?” Paul asks.

“All of them.”

They exchange a look. The main hall contains more than a dozen works.

“Come this way,” Curry says to us, returning to a wall of paintings close to where we found him. “These are the ones I want to show you.”

He walks us before every canvas on the wall, one at a time, but says nothing.

“What do they have in common?” he asks, after letting us take them in.

I shake my head, but Paul sees it at once.

“The subject. They’re all the biblical story of Joseph.”

Curry nods. “
Joseph Selling Wheat to the People
,” he begins, pointing to the first. “By Bartholomeus Breenbergh, about 1655. I convinced the Barber Institute to lend it out.”

He gives us a moment, then moves to the second painting. “
Joseph and his Brothers,
by Franz Maulbertsch, 1750. Look at the obelisk in the background.”

“It reminds me of a print from the
Hypnerotomachia
,” I say.

Curry smiles. “I thought the same thing at first. Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be a connection.”

He walks us toward the third.

“Pontormo,” Paul says before Curry can even begin.

“Yes.
Joseph in Egypt.
”

“How did you get this?”

“London wouldn’t let it come directly to Princeton. I had to arrange it through the Met.”

Curry is about to say something else, when Paul spots the final two paintings in the series. They are a pair of panels, several feet in size, rich with color. The emotion rises in his voice.

“Andrea del Sarto.
Stories of Joseph.
I saw these in Florence.”

Richard Curry is silent. He paid for Paul to spend our freshman summer in Italy researching the
Hypnerotomachia,
the only time Paul has ever left the country.

“I have a friend at the Palazzo Pitti,” Curry says, folding his hands over his chest. “He has been very good to me. I have them on loan for a month.”

Paul stands frozen for a minute, struck silent. His hair is matted to his head, still wet from the snow, but a smile forms on his lips as he turns back to the painting. It occurs to me, finally, after watching his reaction, that the canvases have been mounted in this order for a reason. They form a crescendo of significance only Paul can understand. Curry must have insisted on this arrangement, and the curators must have agreed to it, obliging the trustee who brought more art than all the others combined. The wall in front of us is a gift from Curry to Paul, a silent congratulation on the completion of his thesis.

“Have you read Browning’s poem on Andrea del Sarto?” Curry asks, trying to put words to it.

I have, for a literature seminar, but Paul shakes his head.

“You do what many dream of, all their lives,”
Curry says.
“Dream? Strive to do, and agonize to do, and fail in doing.”

Paul finally turns and puts a hand on Curry’s shoulder. It’s then that he steps back and takes the bundle of cloths from beneath his shirt.

“What’s this?” Curry asks.

“Something Bill just brought me.” Paul falters, and I sense he’s unsure how Curry will react. He carefully unwraps the book. “I think you should see it.”

“My
diary
,” Curry says, stunned. He turns it over in his hands. “I can’t believe it. . . .”

“I’m going to use it,” Paul says. “To finish.”

But Curry ignores him; as he looks down at the book, his smile disappears. “Where did it come from?”

“From Bill.”

“You said that. Where did he find it?”

Paul hesitates. An edge has entered Curry’s voice.

“In a bookstore in New York,” I say. “An antiquarian shop.”

“Impossible,” the man mumbles. “I looked for this book everywhere. Every library, every bookstore, every pawnshop in New York. All of the major auction houses. It was
gone.
For thirty years, Paul. It was gone.”

He turns the pages, carefully scanning them with both his eyes and his hands. “Yes, look. Here’s the section I told you about. Colonna is mentioned here”—he advances to another entry, then to another—“and here.” Abruptly he looks up. “Bill didn’t just stumble onto this tonight. Not the night before your work is due.”

“What do you mean?”

“What about the drawing?” Curry demands. “Bill gave you that too?”

“What drawing?”

“The piece of leather.” Curry forms dimensions from his thumbs and index fingers, about one foot square. “Tucked into the centerfold of the diary. There was a drawing on it. A blueprint.”

“It wasn’t there,” Paul says.

Curry turns the book in his hands again. His eyes have become cold and distant.

“Richard, I have to return the diary to Bill tomorrow,” Paul says. “I’ll read through it tonight. Maybe it can get me through the final section of the
Hypnerotomachia
.”

Curry shakes himself back to the present. “You haven’t finished your work?”

Paul’s voice fills with anxiety. “The last section isn’t like the others.”

“But what about the deadline tomorrow?”

When Paul says nothing, Curry runs his hand over the diary’s cover, then relinquishes it. “Finish. Don’t compromise what you’ve earned. There’s too much at stake.”

“I won’t. I think I’ve almost found it. I’m very close.”

“If you need anything, just say so. An excavation permit. Surveyors. If it’s there, we’ll find it.”

I glance at Paul, wondering what Curry means.

Paul smiles nervously. “I don’t need anything more. I’ll find it on my own, now that I have the diary.”

“Just don’t let it out of your sight. No one has done something like this before. Remember Browning. ‘
What many dream of, all their lives.’
”

“Sir,”
comes a voice from behind us.

We turn to find a curator stepping in our direction.

“Mr. Curry, the trustees’ meeting is beginning soon. Could we ask you to move to the upstairs deck?”

“We’ll talk about this more later,” Curry says, reorienting himself. “I don’t know how long this meeting will be.”

He pats Paul on the arm, shakes my hand, and then walks toward the stairs. When he ascends, we find ourselves alone with the guards.

“I shouldn’t have let him see it,” Paul says, almost to himself, as we turn toward the door.

He pauses to take in the series of images one more time, forming a memory he can return to when the museum is closed. Then we find our way back outside.