Dawn was at hand, and I could already make out objects in the landscape.
—Adolphe
IT WAS FRIDAY and it was Roger on the phone, his voice suavely businesslike, as if one down day for a death was the limit and now we must be up to speed. “Today’s the sale. Are you coming?”
In the confusion and anguish of the past days, I would have forgotten the picture, Drouot, the money, but Roger had whispered to me the night before, “Isabel, I think we go through with the sale, before any new legal conditions obtain. This way it can be argued that selling it was Charles-Henri’s intention as well as Roxy’s, because God knows what complications if the Persands get the idea it’s part of Charles-Henri’s estate. This way there’s no question of us appearing to do anything he hadn’t sanctioned beforehand. In the circumstances, I think we just get it sold now, whatever Roxy says, before whatever new conditions of her legal life set in, fait accompli, as the locals say.”
What had gone on behind the scenes we had no way of knowing, but at Drouot, officials had assured him that with major picture dealers and museum curators already on their way to attend, the sale would be brilliant. Perhaps whiffs of museum gossip, hints of the presence of a Christie’s man speaking to Roger—for whatever reason, they had also now proposed a much higher reserve than the eighty thousand dollars they had originally set. The alluring promise of money has tangible effects, even on auctioneers, and they had clearly been influenced by Christie’s confident attribution (as revealed to them by Roger).
“If nothing is happening with Roxy, I’ll come with you,” I said.
There was no word from or of Roxy, but Chester, at their hotel, said she had been put to bed with indolent cramps and had not been in vigorous labor when they left at three. He sounded sleepy and slightly cross to have been waked up.
“Aren’t you coming to the sale?” I asked.
“I don’t know. I’ll see what Margeeve wants to do. She’ll probably want to stay with Roxy.”
“I’ll go on with Roger,” I said.
“We don’t need to be there,” Chester said. “It isn’t as if we were going to bid on it.”
I needed to be there. I had a sort of superstitious feeling that I needed to be everywhere, to control everything, it was all getting out of control, or would, if I didn’t watch it and note it; I had to be everywhere at once.
We could hardly get into the room where the paintings would be sold. In the atmosphere of commerce and luck, in the poker-playing deadpan gambling atmosphere of an auction house, mere humanity seemed to play only a minor role. Inanimate things reigned, money ruled, competition festered, elation soared. A hundred objects were being carted away or carted in, throngs of people buzzing in French jammed doorways to the various salons, people gazed at rings in glass cases, and battered harpsichords.
Ours was a hot-ticket sale, it seemed, attracting a graver and more barbered crowd than those who had gathered to buy the attic odd-lots in the salle opposite, but who jostled each other viciously all the same. Pushing my way into the room, I became aware that here and there were familiar faces I had not noticed at first. Stuart Barbee and Ames Everett were there, talking to a heavy well-tailored gray man and—something a little surprising—Antoine and Charlotte de Persand, with Charles-Henri’s lawyer Maître Doisneau. Here also was Maître Bertram. There was Monsieur Desmond, the man who had appraised Saint Ursula for the Louvre, and there were a group of men in bow ties and tweed sport coats that could be (for all I knew) from Santa Barbara. Perhaps from the Getty. There was even—it took me a minute to remember who that youngish, balding, familiar man with the long eyelashes was—Monsieur le Directeur du Cabinet, whom I had met at the opera, the under-minister of culture! Now that did astonish me, as Mrs. Pace would say. In a dark suit, double vents, standing to one side in voluble conversation with two other dark-suited men, who had both put their briefcases on the floor, making me think of spy films where they are going to switch the cases. Monsieur Desmond went over to them.
I waved over someone’s shoulder to Antoine de Persand and Charlotte. “I didn’t realize you’d be coming.”
Antoine frowned a little, as if he were surprised to see me, and weighed his answer for what seemed a long moment.
“I suppose it is up to me now, to see that Roxeanne’s affaires are conducted correctly and to look after the interests of my niece and the baby,” he said, shrugging unhappily. “What is correct, of course, that is not so easy to say.” He jostled his way closer to me.
“The baby is on the way!” I cried. “Maybe here by now!”
“Yes, your mother called. Suzanne has gone to the clinique. A baby will ease her heart a little.”
“Maître Bertram is here, Roxy’s lawyer,” I observed.
“Yes, I spoke to him. He says there is an important Poussin being sold here today as well.” That was probably why the under-minister of culture was here, looking after the patrimony of France.
Behind rows of chairs where privileged bidders were sitting, standees closely thronged. I am tall, and yet, stuck in the back as we were, I could hardly see the podium. Roger, who is taller, was better positioned too, but neither of us could understand what was going on anyway. An auctioneer at a raised dais stood indicating a painting on an easel behind him. His explanations, in rapid French, would excite murmurs or silence, then people would mention sums of francs, inaudibly, several people, then at the end only two, and it would be abruptly over, with the sharp crack of the gavel and a rustle of comment from the audience. In this fashion, several paintings were whisked in and out and away before our eyes: a Watteau, an Inconnu, a Lapautre, a Bouguereau, a Rosa Bonheur.
A groundling undertone of excitement mounted with each successive exchange, affecting me, perhaps Roger too, with an anxious wish it could be over. As so often, I had too much the feeling of being a powerless spectator caught up in an unwanted event. Could it be true that Saint Ursula would come in, meet her fate, and be gone in this summary way, even as Roxy lay groaning, unaware, in some clinic somewhere? The treachery of our action in letting the sale go on struck me only now.
When a large mythological scene—hunters in togas chasing a deer—was brought in and placed reverently on the easel, the room became hushed. The important people were evidently not gathered as I had thought for our Saint Ursula, but for this Poussin. The auctioneer discussed it a moment in a somber, portentous tone: “A company of the followers of Diana—Regard the coloration. . . .
“Am I bid six million to start?” he asked. A man two rows ahead of me made a tiny gesture that I could see from where I stood, but I could not see other bidders who nonetheless were there, driving up the price, up, up up, to forty million francs. When this price had been achieved, with no change of expression, when a long and even agonizing pause announced the end and the collapse of the rest, and the bang of the gavel completed the sale, the Poussin was carted from the room as unceremoniously as the painting of inconnu. The auctioneer permitted a sigh, a stretch, a pause. Ames Everett, seeing me, winked. The under-minister of culture nodded with a half smile, wondering, I was sure, where he had seen me.
Other pictures, and finally Saint Ursula. My heart pounded to see her amused and slightly repelled expression. I tried to see Roger’s face but could not. I sensed his excitement all the same. We stood trembling in the crowd. “La Tour,” I heard the auctioneer say, but not école and not élève, though he could have, the words spun in my ears. “Do I hear two hundred thousand?” he said.
It seemed no more than forty seconds before Saint Ursula was knocked down at ten million francs, a struggle between two bidders principally. One was the man standing with Ames and Stuart, the other, in his tweed sport coat and bow tie, an American, I was sure. I had no idea which had bought our painting. For a second I even had trouble calculating the amount in dollars. My heart was thundering. Almost two million dollars!
It was only at this very minute that I realized we wouldn’t have to split it with the Persands, either. I wonder if Antoine realized that. I could see his expression of glassy shock, muttering to Frédéric. I calculated further. Let’s say split four ways—me, Roxy, Roger, Judith—there would ultimately if not immediately be for me two hundred and fifty thousand dollars! Surely Chester would advance me the price of a tureen—not Mrs. Pace’s, of course. I thought of all the other things I could do with a quarter of a million dollars. I wondered if this could do anything to make Roxy less unhappy. Probably it would make her feel worse, to profit somehow from the death of her beloved. I tried to leave the room, to breathe luxuriously in the hall, but I was packed too closely in. There were another ten pictures to sell, then it was over.
“Isabel!” said Stuart Barbee, coming up to me when the crowd began to drift out. He was trying to smile, but his face was distorted with a misery I had seen earlier when he stood talking to Ames. “Isabel, I’m so happy for Roxeanne. She needs some luck, poor girl. . . .”
“What’s the matter, Stuart?” I asked.
“Conrad has been arrested,” he whispered. Conrad his friend the English hairdresser.
“What for?”
“For burglary.”
How it worked I figured perfectly: Stuart gave Conrad photos and tips. Unknowingly? Conrad gave the photos to a dealer friend who showed them to clients. Then Conrad went and burgled the things that clients asked for. I wondered, had it been Conrad who had “visited” Suzanne after we told Stuart about all her beautiful stuff?
I considered extorting from Stuart at least Mrs. Pace’s tureen. I could say, get it back or I will tell everything. I’ll describe how I took the photo, gave it to you, then triggered its theft by promising to buy it from the dealer. Get it back or I will involve you. But then I thought it might be better not to let him know my role; we would get it back through the police anyway. But what was Stuart’s role? And the connection with Mrs. Pace’s files? It still seemed funny to imagine the CIA running a porcelain burglary ring.
“He was just standing there, outside a house in Chartres, and the flics came up and grabbed him,” Stuart went on.
“Bonjour, mademoiselle,” interrupted the under-minister of culture in the rustle of the crowd. “Miss Walker, am I right? So you interest yourself in the art treasures of France?”
I guess I don’t believe in God, at least not as much as Roxy does; all the same, it is hard not to believe this little consolation was sent by some benign cosmic intent. The under-minister was talking to me! And that was not all. I was glad I had dressed up, and was carrying the Kelly.
“I had to see the fate of my little La Tour,” I said with what I hoped was immense composure.
“Indeed! Your La Tour? I came because I was interested to see what would happen with the great Poussin. As to the La Tour, we had hoped . . . yours, you say?” Smooth diplomat’s charming smile, concealing concern.
“It belonged to my family.” I was conscious of Stuart’s ironic look. Well, didn’t it?
“Indeed! Extraordinary. Do you know who the buyer was?”
“No, not yet. Have you met my brother and sister-in-law?” For the jubilant Roger, Jane at his elbow, had made his way to my side. They and the under-minister (Monsieur LeLay) exchanged bonjours.
“I wonder about the export situation? Obviously it is a national treasure. It appears there was a moment of inattention at the Louvre. We must look into it—the Louvre will review it,” Monsieur le Directeur etc. went on. “I wonder that they didn’t review it before this. I will look into it.” I felt myself grow wary. Could they bring up the export license thing again?
“Perhaps—I hope you are not pressed, mademoiselle? Would you consider having lunch with me, for I would very much like—in my role at the ministry—to hear the history of this lovely French picture, how it came to be in your family and so on. Today, or some other time soon, what do you say?”
Covertly, I studied him. It seemed to me this was not the diplomat but the man talking. I accepted, of course, though not for today. I explained that my sister was having a baby.
“Give me your numéro de téléphone, mademoiselle,” he said, pulling out his elegant little carnet from Hermès.
Baby Charles-Luc was born that afternoon, weighing three and a half kilos—the phone was ringing as the ecstatic Roger, Jane, and I came into Roxy’s. An easy delivery, mother and baby doing well. We headed for the clinic to meet the baby, and tell Roxy the news.
At the burial on Monday, a cold, funereal day, Roxy was very beautiful in a black suit I hadn’t seen before, which must from the way it fit her slightly stouter figure have been new. She carried the baby, little Charles-Luc, wrapped in dimity and lace, as if this were a christening rather than a funeral. At one point she handed him (a minute, wizened, red creature) to Chester, who gazed at him proudly, and Roxy occupied herself with Gennie, who fidgeted in her little fur-trimmed blue coat, overawed by the collection of relatives and mourners gathered in the cold winter morning among the imposing granite-winged monuments of the Cimetière du Montparnasse.
Of course Magda would not come to the obsèques, we had heard she was still in the hospital. Nonetheless I looked for a mysterious person in a black veil lingering on the fringes behind the willow shrubs. The scene made me think of the funeral of John F. Kennedy, which I had seen a newsreel of. I think Roxy was remembering it too, though neither of us was born then, for she seemed to borrow her demeanor of dignified, grieving widow from the performance of Jackie. She knelt at the grave. Behind her, standing a little apart from the Persands, was Maître Bertram. There were Madame Cosset with Antoine and Trudi, Yvonne, Charlotte and Bob, Frédéric but not his wife, Suzanne, also in black, and—I was most curious—Monsieur de Persand, a tall, thin man with a white mustache and a restless, angry expression when he glanced at us and at our uninhibited New World sobbing. How correct they were in their mourning garments. How correct they had been all the way through.
It was an American who had killed him. I knew they were not forgetting that. Nor had his American wife been able to prevent it, with her inadequate arts. Members of a childish nation—I knew what they thought—cradle of killers and art thieves. (And of porcelain thieves, they would have said, had they known.) How much better, they must have been thinking, if the Marquis de Lafayette had never gone over there.
How beautiful Roxy was, Roxy who was now theirs forever, widow of their son, mother of their grandchildren—the widow a hallowed person in France, I gathered, emblem of fidelity and patient grief. She stood a little apart from the Persands and also from our parents, solitary in her sorrow except for the attentive Maître Bertram.
“ ‘Je suis la ténébreuse, la veuve, l’inconsolée,’ ” she whispered, kneeling by the grave, paraphrasing (she told me later) some lines of Nerval. “ ‘Pleurez! Enfants, vous n’avez plus de père.’ ”
Maître Bertram assisted her to rise with a light, solicitous grasp of her elbow. Her expression of grief contained inner serenity, a luminous certitude. Perhaps she had everything she wanted. I was given a glimpse of Roxy, just then, as someone who always will get what she wants.
“Oh, Iz,” whispered Margeeve when the clods began to fall, “now Roxy can come home.” Maybe she would, maybe she wouldn’t.
She had no need to choose. She had everything she wanted. L’américaine. She could have everything. She had helped herself. She had borne and survived, and would continue, no doubt. She could choose among continents, languages, religions, and roles.
Not to speak of myself, but I was thinking of how perfect Roxy was, a lily of the field, and of how she had what she wanted. I thought of Mary and Martha. In our days of going to Sunday school (we had to when we were your age, Margeeve and Chester had explained when we asked them why they didn’t go) the story of Mary and Martha was one of the many Biblical stories from which I had drawn a moral the opposite of the one intended, and was on the wrong side, as in the novels of Henry James, which Mrs. Pace had suggested I read. I knew you were supposed to be Mary; but Roxy was Mary.