MR. SHEER fired his stenographer in order to give me the job. It puzzled me at the time that he should so readily dismiss a professional whom he paid ten dollars a week to take on an amateur at eleven. I now see that he must have owed her money. Several times during that summer she would come into the gallery, a badly made-up blond girl in a dark dress that the hot days and the continual sitting had wrinkled at the waist. He would hold whispered conversations with her in the outer room, and at length she would go away. Later on, after I had quit, I, too, would make regular calls to collect my back pay, and there would be another girl sitting at my desk, while I, as a mark of special courtesy, would be led into the inner exhibition room reserved for customers. There he would whisper to me, and, on a few occasions, press into my hand, as if it were something indecent, a tightly folded five-dollar bill. After a great many visits I succeeded in getting, in such small driblets, all that was owed me, but my case was exceptional. Mr. Sheer’s usual method of dealing with a creditor was simply to dispense with his services. This worked quite well with everyone but the telephone company, for, while there are many stationers, many photographers, many landlords, there is only one American Tel. & Tel.
Mr. Sheer was extremely resourceful in financial matters. It was he who taught me how to get a free lemonade on a stifling day. You go into the Automat (there was one conveniently located across the street from our building), and you pick up several of the slices of lemon that are put out for the benefit of tea drinkers near the tea tap. Then you pour yourself a glass of ice water, squeeze the lemon into it, add sugar from one of the tables, and stir.
Mr. Sheer was a dealer in objects of art, a tall, pale-eyed man with two suits and many worries. Downstairs in the building directory he was listed as The Savile Galleries, and the plural conveyed a sense of endless vistas of rooms gleaming with collector’s items. Like Mr. Sheer himself, that plural was imaginative, winged with ambition, but untrustworthy. Actually, the Savile Galleries consisted of two small, dark, stuffy rooms whose natural gloom was enhanced by heavy velvet drapes in wine-red and blackish green which were hung from ceiling to floor with the object of concealing the neutral office-building walls. There was also another and still smaller room which had no drapes and was therefore more cheerful, but this was merely the inner office where the stenographer and the Negro boy assistant were herded, together with the office supplies, the Social Register, and Poor’s Business Directory, and where the sitter for a miniature in progress was occasionally tied.
For Mr. Sheer’s gallery was unique in one respect. On my first day there I had stared hopefully about at the shabby collection of priests’ robes, china figurines, clocks, bronzes, carved ivories, old silver, porcelains, and seen only the scrapings of the Fifty-ninth Street auction rooms. In a glass case off in one corner, there were a few garnet chokers, some earrings in wrought Italian silver, and an improbable-looking sapphire ring in an out-of-date claw setting. On the walls hung a couple of faded paintings of the Hudson River School and some gaudy scenes of Venice, which, as I learned later, had been signed by Mr. Sheer with any Italian name that happened to come into his head. (As he said, there was nothing really wrong with this practice of his: it made the customer feel better to see some name on a picture, and it was not, after all, as if he were attributing them to Raphael.) But that morning, knowing nothing of Mr. Sheer, I had looked about at all those tarnished objects (I had been led to expect something grander, more artistic, more “interesting”) and tears had come to my eyes as I wondered how I should describe this dreary job to my family and friends. It was then that I noticed the smell.
“Dogs,” Mr. Sheer said. “Wear your dog on your sleeve.” I stared at him. He went into the inner office and came back with a jeweler’s box in which lay a pair of crystal cuff links. Buried in the crystals, one could see a tiny pair of scotties. “They’re real portraits,” he said. “We do them right here in the gallery. Something newer than monograms.” He held them up for me to look at. “Isn’t that a beautiful bit of workmanship?” he asked. His face lit up as he pronounced this sentence. “Look at that coat. You can see every hair.” The artist, he explained, was an elderly Frenchman who, before the War, had done all the Kaiser’s dogs in miniature, an achievement Mr. Sheer never failed to linger over in the sales letters he dictated. How much this meant to Mr. Sheer I did not understand until I suggested one day that we should omit the part about the Kaiser from a follow-up I was writing. It was the only time he was ever angry with me. I saw then that it was not solely Monsieur Ravasse’s talents that made Mr. Sheer treat him, alone of his associates, with a subservient respect, made him pay him, take his scoldings, ask his advice. Unquestionably, Monsieur Ravasse’s work did excite Mr. Sheer’s admiration—every pair of cuff links, every brooch was for him a new miracle—but the greater miracle had, I am afraid, taken place inside Mr. Sheer’s head: he had succumbed to the spell of his own salesmanship, and Monsieur Ravasse had become interchangeable with the Kaiser in his mind.
At any rate, commercially speaking, Monsieur Ravasse was, virtually, our only asset, and it was these custom-made dog crystals that Mr. Sheer was pushing all that hot summer I worked for him. There was not a great margin of profit to be made on them, and many inconveniences attended their execution, but they were the only things we had that tempted the rich people, who, on Long Island, in New Jersey, in the Adirondacks, in Canada, were feeling themselves poor. In the letters I took from his dictation all our pieces were described as Extraordinary Bargains, Sacrifices, Exceptional Opportunities, Fine Investments Especially In These Times. But the rich people seldom believed. Mr. Sheer might insist that “an opportunity like this may never present itself again,” but only when a man’s own dog was concerned did the argument carry much weight. A seventeenth-century tapestry would still exist when times got better (if they ever did); one could afford to wait and pay a little more, if necessary. But one’s own dog might die, or the aging artist, who after all dated from Louis Napoleon, might die himself. So one might perhaps hurry, as Mr. Sheer urged, to-take-advantage-of-this-remarkable-offer.
During that summer we turned out several Bedlingtons, a cairn, two Kerry blues, some German sheep dogs, and even a chihuahua, which, being itself a miniature, proved, in Mr. Sheer’s opinion, the least interesting of all our subjects. There were also extensive negotiations with a lady who had thirty-one toy spaniels, but she and Mr. Sheer could never get together on the price (for she felt that the number of dogs entitled her to a cut rate), and the project was finally abandoned.
The dogs who came up from Long Island or New Jersey presented no particular problems. They arrived with their handlers, posed for a few hours, and then went home until the next day. Naturally, the miniature would have to be repainted at least once, for the owners never felt that their pets had been done justice, but this was a relatively simple matter. It was the dogs who were not within commuting distance that gave us trouble. Such a dog would arrive by Railway Express, boxed up in a cage and wild with hunger. Arrangements would have been made, of course, for it to be fed by the trainmen on the way, but, as far as we could tell, this was never done. We would take the cage into the inner office, open it, and the animal would shoot out and bite me on the leg. There was one cairn who came out like a black cannonball and was crazy ever after. The dogs were usually in such bad condition that extensive treatment by a veterinary was necessary before we could allow them to pose. The cairn was never able to pose at all. We kept him in the office for a long time, trying to soothe him back to sanity, but it was no use, and when he finally bit Mr. Sheer’s red-haired mistress, we sent him home to his owner, who threatened to sue us for what had happened.
Yet in spite of the havoc created by this business, the nervous strain and the expense, the smell and the smallness of the profit, there was nearly always a dog boarding in my office, eating the choicest dog meat while Mr. Sheer went without his lunch. As the summer wore on, the smell of the dogs mingled with the damp, sour odor of the old velvet drapes, with the colored boy’s personal smell, with the smell of Mr. Sheer’s two suits, which were stiff with dried sweat, until our very skins were soaked with the gallery, and even outside, on the streets, we walked about with a special, occupational scent.
We were not making money. In spite of the commissioned crystals we were not so much as breaking even. The second morning I came to work I was met by a square man with a badge who was putting a sign on the door. The sign read, PUBLIC AUCTION TODAY.
I took out my key and said politely, “I didn’t know there was to be an auction.”
“Really?” said the man. “Maybe you want to pay this forty-three eighty-five then?” And he shoved a document at me.
“You mean,” I said, “it’s a debt?”
“Don’t kid me, sister,” said the man, “I’m the city marshal.”
I began to talk very rapidly, to say that I was sure Mr. Sheer didn’t know about this, that it must be an oversight, that he would be here any minute, that the marshal must wait till he came. But another man came up the hall and began to help him with the sign, and the city marshal’s only replies were derisive and they were addressed, not to me, but to his assistant, who found them very amusing. I went into my office, put my head on the typewriter, and started to cry.
At once the city marshal was bending over me, his hand on my shoulder.
“For God’s sake, sister, don’t cry,” he said. “What’s the trouble? This guy your sweetheart?”
“No,” I sobbed.
“He a relation of yours?”
“No.”
“Then for God’s sake what are you crying about?”
“Because I’m not accustomed to being spoken to in such a manner.”
He dropped his hand in amazement. Then he went out and took the sign down.
“You think this guy will pay up?”
“Yes.”
“All right. See that he has the money at my office at four o’clock sharp.”
The two of them went away, carrying the sign.
Mr. Sheer slipped in at noon with an apprehensive air. I expected him to share my indignation at the law’s high-handedness, but he seemed, rather, to take the city marshal’s attitude. He listened to my story with some astonishment, and then laughed in a relieved way, and shook my hand several times and said I was going to make a wonderful secretary.
“But you must pay the money right away,” I said.
“Yes,” he answered vaguely.
However, I nagged him about it until he made some phone calls, in the inner office, with the door closed. He then went out, and the city marshal never came again, so, presumably, the debt was paid.
In conversation Mr. Sheer frequently reverted to the city marshal’s visit. In his eyes, one could see, it marked a turning-point in his career. Obviously, as I recognized later, he had been expecting the city marshal and his sign, had tried in all quarters to raise the money and failed. That was why he had not come in until noon, for in the face of danger Mr. Sheer always disappeared. He had resigned himself to the loss of his business and the concomitant loss of prestige. He had seen himself condemned, cast back into the outer darkness from which he had risen, back into that nether world where a public auction or a bankruptcy or a jail term carried no stigma. He had already accepted his sentence when he discovered that he had been reprieved, as if by a miracle, at the eleventh hour. He had been given, as it were, a second chance, and with it came a second wind that enabled him to effect, easily, by a few telephone calls, what for weeks had been the impossible—the settlement of a debt of forty-three dollars and some odd cents. After this, Mr. Sheer’s hold on respectability was much more tenacious, for after this Mr. Sheer no longer believed that his clutching fingers could be shaken off.
However unappetizing, however eccentric his gallery might appear to the sophisticated world, to Mr. Sheer these rooms with their dark velvet, their porcelain urns, their statuary, their dirty chasubles hung from the ceiling, their little rococo chairs, and their deep, velvet-covered sofa incarnated a double dream. From his Western boyhood, he said, he had loved dogs and culture. There was a rich man back in San Francisco whose dogs he had valeted and whose lawn he had watered; now and then he had been allowed to look at this man’s fine library, which contained, he declared with reminiscent awe, “all these wonderful works on Shakespeare and vice versa.” Today, as at that time, the dog was the natural highway to culture, and Mr. Sheer perceived no incongruity between the tarnished luxury of his setting and the homeliness of his liveliest line of goods.
He had begun as a bootlegger shortly after Prohibition had come in. He had perhaps been jailed (his accounts of his past were always vague and contradictory), but at any rate he had left the liquor business to become a veterinary’s assistant. After a short period as a prize fighter’s handler, he had bought himself small kennels, and he had but recently progressed from selling dogs to selling their miniatures. He had met Monsieur Ravasse at his kennels one day, and had been inspired by him to open a novelty jewelry business in which the crystals played a leading part. His imagination, however, had been kindled less by the stones he dealt in than by the clocks, the carved ivories, the church vessels, the china mantel ornaments—all the rich and bizarre oddities that clutter the fringe of the jewelry trade; and it had not been long before I. F. Sheer, Jeweler had melted into The Savile Galleries. His gallery was the least rewarding of all his ventures, but it was dearer to him than any. Having pursued the luxury trades with considerable single-mindedness, he had now arrived at a point where the Right People, who had almost all his life been his customers, were now to become his clients—if he could only persuade them to buy.
For if Mr. Sheer loved culture, he loved Money too, and he could not always keep them apart in his mind (it was a rich man that had owned that library). Indeed it was sometimes difficult to tell whether he loved culture simply as an appurtenance of wealth or whether he loved it genuinely, for its own sake. He was fond of the fine arts, fond of long words, and fond of me, but was this simply because he felt that between us we could make a prosperous gentleman out of him? I am not sure. He could never use the long words correctly and he could hardly tell a Cellini from a Remington; yet surely there was a kind of integrity in that very lack of taste.
He was really proud of his stock; he admired everything indiscriminately. If he had nothing else to do, he would walk about the gallery, studying the pieces. When he could no longer contain himself he would summon me from my desk and point to a canal or to a bit of foliage in a picture and exclaim, “Isn’t that a wonderful piece of painting?” Or of a vase, “Come here, Miss Sargent, and look at that glaze.” It was all wonderful to him.
He worshipped any kind of ingenuity: boxes with false bottoms, cuckoo clocks, oval miniatures of the school of Boucher that opened if you pressed a button and disclosed a pornographic scene. He liked little statues that became fountains, Victorian banks made to resemble birds’ nests, where the bird grasped the coin in its beak and dropped it when the lever was pulled. And for him the supreme ingenuity was the great trompe l’oeil of art itself, which made a painted canal look exactly like a real one and a bronze statue simulate a man. He had no use for modern art or modern design (although he knew them to be fashionable); it puzzled and annoyed him that anyone should, for example, make a set of book-ends that looked, simply, like themselves. The whole conception of functionalism was odious to him, for since art was in his eyes a splendid confidence game, the craftsman who did not, in some fashion, deceive his public seemed to him a sort of stool-pigeon, a high-class rat.
The colored boy who worked for us had far more taste, and he and I, in the little inner office, formed a Connoisseurs’ League to pass on the new objects as they came in. But such distinctions, whether they came from me, from the colored boy, from another dealer, or from a customer, only angered Mr. Sheer. They smacked of disloyalty, not only to Mr. Sheer’s business, but to art itself. And they seemed to him unnatural: he always suspected a hidden motive. Another dealer was plainly trying to run down Mr. Sheer’s business for competitive reasons; the colored boy was making himself disagreeable because his salary had not been paid; the customer had a prejudice against the genre in question; and I was a college girl whose head had been stuffed with faddish preferences for modern design.
It is possible that it was merely the pride of ownership that was coloring Mr. Sheer’s vision: his objects, being all extensions of his own personality, were all therefore equal in his heart. Certainly, I have often, walking down Fifty-seventh Street with him, seen a tapestry that was, to me, indistinguishable from one in Mr. Sheer’s possession, and heard him, pausing, compare it unfavorably to his own. But there was always a certain fretfulness in his voice which came from the fact that he really felt the other tapestry to be quite as wonderful as his.
In any case, if the pride of ownership was working in Mr. Sheer, that pride was, characteristically, unreal, since the ownership was factitious. Mr. Sheer did not, I discovered, own a single one of the objects he displayed; indeed, so far as the ornamental arts were concerned, he had never owned anything more than a tie-pin in his life.
His gallery was stocked with loans from other dealers, merchandise that he held “on consignment.” Some of it had been freely offered: another dealer who happened to have an unfashionable marble on his hands, a trade-in, say, that he despaired of selling to his own clients, would promise Mr. Sheer a commission to dispose of it. Others had been more artfully extracted. Mr. Sheer, hearing of a fine jade that was owned by someone else, would pretend to have a client who was interested in just such a piece. The other dealer would yield up the jade, and Mr. Sheer would promptly display it in his gallery. He would then have to stall off the owner with a variety of excuses until a real client could be found to take the place of the imaginary one. If no real client materialized, the jade would eventually have to be returned, but a long time usually elapsed before Mr. Sheer would admit defeat. In these ways, Mr. Sheer kept his gallery well populated with objects. That excessive secrecy and cunning, so characteristic of the trade, played directly into his hands. Each dealer assumed that he was the only one using the Savile Galleries as an outlet. There would have been considerable astonishment in Fifty-ninth Street circles had the dealers learned that they had unwittingly formed a combination to provide Mr. Sheer with what was really the capital for a rival gallery.
As for Mr. Sheer himself, he was careful to wrap all his affairs in such a cocoon of falsehoods that, of all the people associated with him, only the colored boy, whose job it was to call for and deliver merchandise, had any suspicion of the truth. Like all my own discoveries about Mr. Sheer, this one was made painfully and by accident. He was not given to confession, and any unsolicited information he advanced about himself was likely to be either unimportant or false. In general, his aversion to truth-telling was fanatical—to tell the truth, at any time, on any matter, to any hearer, was, he believed, profoundly dangerous: any fact, however small, however harmless, provided it was a fact, was better concealed: facts were high explosives. Never, for example, during the time I worked for him, did I learn where he lived. He would disappear at night and return in the morning. If he were late, customers and creditors would have to wait for him; there was no way, I was continually explaining, of reaching him by phone. Since those days, I have often badgered him about this question, and he has told me a number of different stories. He has said that he was living with a woman, which I suspected, that he was passing back and forth between dollar-a-night hotels and flophouses, and was ashamed to tell me, which is possible, that he was sleeping on the divan in the gallery, which I know to be true, for one morning when he had overslept I found him there, in a rumpled pair of shorts, his close-curling hair damp with summer-morning sweat. Yet these explanations, taken separately or together, do not satisfy me. They may one or all be true, but there must have been something more.
All during what I now think of as the dime-novel period of my employment with Mr. Sheer, I had no idea of the facts about the gallery. I did not find out until the very end. Had I been able to shake off the idea that Mr. Sheer was an ordinary businessman who was a little bit hard up, I might have been in a better position to understand what was going on.
The thing began with a series of telephone calls from a man named Bierman, to whom Mr. Sheer was always out, but for whom a message was regularly left, a message so full of consideration and empty of meaning that it was clear that Bierman was a special case, a creditor perhaps, but no run-of-the-mill creditor.
“Tell him I’ll call him back in an hour,” Mr. Sheer invariably whispered, or if he were stepping out, as he called it, for a few minutes, he would not fail to remind me, “If Bierman calls, tell him I’ll call him back in an hour.” Since Mr. Sheer never did call Bierman back, and since, as the days passed, the frequency of Bierman’s calls increased until they were coming at fifteen-minute intervals, I protested against having to repeat this farcical sentence, and begged Mr. Sheer to change the message, to suppress it altogether, or to speak to Bierman, who was getting very angry. But Mr. Sheer refused. The sentence, in his eyes, was a mark of civility to Bierman. To leave no message would be the equivalent of cutting him on the street. The sentence, moreover, had, for him, a kind of magic that I did not understand until I had had a longer experience of Mr. Sheer and his promises. Mr. Sheer’s promises were a kind of fiat money issued at will and with no regard to fulfillment, or, indeed, to plausibility. He differed from the ordinary debtor who, under pressure, offers a promise as a substitute for cash, in that the ordinary debtor is not deceived by the substitute, but expects the creditor to be, while Mr. Sheer was himself deceived and concerned himself hardly at all with what the creditor might think. And it was not only to creditors that Mr. Sheer extended his gilded pledges. He showered them about him like an obstinate philanthropist. He knew where he could get me an ermine wrap for practically nothing (I had nowhere to wear it). He knew a man that would place Elmer, the colored boy, in the Cotton Club floor show (Elmer was a serious-minded youth who did not dance). Objectively, none of the promises had any validity. Their usefulness was of a different sort. They acted as a kind of transmission belt to the real world from the world of Mr. Sheer’s fancy, the powerhouse of dreams that kept his life’s wheels turning. So this sentence which I kept passing on reassured Mr. Sheer in the same measure that it infuriated Bierman.
When the man commenced to shout at me on the phone and, what was worse from Mr. Sheer’s point of view, to mention a lawyer, Mr. Sheer reluctantly abandoned that particular magic. Instead, he drew me into the dark inner room, seated me on the velvet couch, and announced with an appealingly gloomy air that he was going to take me into his confidence. Bierman was a jeweler, he said, and it was a question of diamonds. The story branched out and became more elaborate, and on subsequent days he gave me different versions of it, but this was all I was ever certain of: Bierman was a jeweler and it was a question of diamonds.
I know this because very early in the game I talked to Bierman himself in his office.
Even here perhaps I am too cocksure, for I remember, uncomfortably, a scheme by which Mr. Sheer at a later date staved off a creditor. He had borrowed a hunting bronze featuring some falcons from a lady art dealer, and had got Abernethie and Rich to display it in a window full of hunting equipment. Through them, he had sold it to one of the Long Island sporting people. When Mrs. Martino, the dealer, wanted her money, it had already been parceled out to the landlord, the stationer, the photographer, and the telephone company. It was true, Mr. Sheer informed her, that he had sold the picture, but he had not yet been paid. This held Mrs. Martino at bay for some months, but at the end of that time, she began to make herself unpleasant, and Mr. Sheer saw that it was time to act. He went around to Abernethie’s and asked for the loan of one of their offices “to talk to a client in.” They gave him an office marked VICE-PRESIDENT. He arranged to have Mrs. Martino meet him there, and arrived himself a little ahead of time, accompanied by an old vaudeville actor he knew. The vaudevillian hid his hat and sat down behind the desk. When Mrs. Martino was shown in, the man was introduced by Mr. Sheer as Mr. Brown of Abernethie’s. The vaudevillian then explained to her in a Keith-time version of a fox-hunting dialect that the bronze had indeed been sold “to an old and valued client,” who “settled his accounts” only once a year, “the English system, you know; we can’t hurry a man like that.” Mrs. Martino, who was Spanish, was powerfully impressed, and it was six months before she went back to Abernethie’s to question Mr. Brown again. Then Mr. Sheer was obliged to pay up instantly, but the next day he borrowed back half the money from Mrs. Martino’s husband.
Bierman must have been real, however, for in the interview Mr. Sheer projected it was I who was to pretend to be someone else.
He had borrowed some diamonds from Bierman, he said, to show to a friend, a playboy named Carew. But Carew, who was considering buying them for a chorus girl he was keeping, had disappeared with the diamonds before coming to any decision. It was a criminal offense to let jewelry that you had taken on consignment go out of your possession, so Bierman would have to be kept from legal action until Carew could be found. Now supposing I were to go to Bierman and say that I was a rich widow who had bought the diamonds from Mr. Sheer but would be unable to pay until my next dividend fell due. . . .
“But what if he should ask to see them?” I said.
“Tell him you sent them home to Pittsburgh to have them reset.”
“But I don’t look like a rich widow—”
“You married young,” said Mr. Sheer. “Do you want me to go to Sing Sing?”
In the end I persuaded him that my impersonation of this character would only evoke catcalls from Bierman. But I would go to him in my own person, I said, tell him the truth, and beg him to wait a little. I could go, Mr. Sheer finally conceded, if I promised not to mention Carew. I should merely say that the stones had been sent out for resetting and there had been an unavoidable delay.
Just as I was leaving, Mr. Sheer had an afterthought. I was to tell Bierman, he said, that if anything should go wrong, Mr. Sheer would make good because his mother had a diamond that was worth more than all of Bierman’s stones put together, and he would be glad to wire his mother in California to send this diamond for Bierman to hold as security.
“But does your mother really have a diamond?” I asked, and indeed I was surprised to hear that Mr. Sheer really had a mother.
“Of course,” he replied impatiently. But he never spoke of it again. Whether it was out of respect for Mr. Sheer’s mother or out of respect for Mr. Sheer’s imagination, I do not know, but neither Bierman nor I, whatever the provocation, was ever so tactless as to remind him of this promise.
In a little office back of a jewelry store I told Bierman, a small, all-gray man, the story Mr. Sheer had prepared for me, including, at the end, the vision of the fabulous diamond in California. I did not expect him to believe me. But when I finished he seemed convinced. It was not so much that he believed in a literal sense what I was saying (he could hardly have been so naïve), but he appeared to trust what was behind what I was saying, the intention to make things right. It occurred to me after this episode that Mr. Sheer was fond of me and sometimes paid my salary, not, as I sometimes thought, out of snobbism because he believed me to be a lady, nor out of cultural aspiration because he believed me to be educated, but simply because I was the only one of his retinue who had an honest face.
Already I had fobbed off the city marshal, now I had pacified Bierman, and it was not long before I was being sent on errands of the most dubious nature, leaving Mr. Sheer behind in the Savile Galleries, secure in his confidence that my good faith would not be questioned. After this, it was I who was sent to get credit from tradesmen, I who cashed checks, I who would walk down Madison Avenue with a clock under my arm, going from door to door of the jewelers in the attempt to sell it for cash. It was even I who in a dark room taken by the hour in a questionable hotel showed a tiny, eight-by-ten Rembrandt, which I now think must certainly have been stolen, to various rat-faced men who came by appointment to examine it, while Mr. Sheer in the closet waited for results.
Of course, if I were to remain valuable to Mr. Sheer, I would have to believe that the checks were good, that the Rembrandt was genuine and legally acquired, that if the story I was telling Bierman were false, nevertheless the story that lay hidden behind it was true and not discreditable. And here lay Mr. Sheer’s dilemma: if he kept me in a state of innocence (which was difficult since I handled all his business), I might blunder on one of my errands and get him into trouble; but if he allowed me to be corrupted by knowledge of his affairs, I would lose that earnest sincerity that could never be properly simulated. The dilemma was insoluble, as he discovered later. Meanwhile, his brain was kept working overtime, for each of his deceptions had to be double-barreled, one set of lies for his creditors and one for me.
Looking back, I see that, in the Bierman case, the Carew story was the lie intended for domestic consumption. Surely Carew must have been fictional, for when the finale of the diamond business took place, there was no Carew in it at all, and, in the years I have known Mr. Sheer since, I have never seen or heard of that playboy, as Mr. Sheer always called him, who figured so largely in my life that summer. Neither have I ever seen the name in Winchell’s column.
I returned to the gallery from Bierman’s store, ready for action. The thing to do, I said, was to find Carew at once. Mr. Sheer, it seemed to me, had been strangely apathetic about looking for him. He had heard a rumor, he finally murmured, that the girl Carew was keeping had been seen in Atlantic City.
“We must look for him in Atlantic City then,” I announced energetically. “What hotel do you think he would be staying at?”
Mr. Sheer named a hotel and I called it by long distance. There was no Thomas Carew registered there. I called a second and a third, but there was still no Carew. Mr. Sheer began to find the search enlivening, and together we called all the hotels in Atlantic City, but it was quite fruitless. Then I remembered having read in detective stories that people who went to seaside resorts with girls would often register under false names but use their own initials so that the name on the register would match the luggage. I suggested that we try asking for anybody whose initials were “T. C.” Mr. Sheer was enthusiastic about the idea, and we called all the hotels over again, but either the clerks would not co-operate with us or the people we got on the wire were indignant when Mr. Sheer would open the conversation by asking if they were Tom Carew. Mr. Sheer was positive, however, that none of the men he talked to had Carew’s voice. We passed a whole afternoon this way, an afternoon we both enjoyed, I because I felt myself hot on the trail of the fugitive, like a particularly bright and wily bloodhound, and Mr. Sheer, no doubt, because he had a taste for practical jokes, and found this search for an imaginary Carew a pleasant diversion from his troubles.
But his mood changed when I remarked that though we had not been able to find Carew, our idea was still good, and we might now try looking for the girl. What was her name, I asked. Mr. Sheer did not reply directly.
“You know, Miss Sargent,” he said, getting up, “I’ve just been thinking that we’re wasting our time this way. The best thing to do is to get a detective on it. I think I’ll just run around and talk to O’Bannon. If Bierman calls tell him I’ll call him back in an hour.”
He took up his hat, paused at the door as he always did to look up and down the corridor, and went on out.
O’Bannon was a friend of Mr. Sheer’s, a private detective who was known in the trade for having a particularly choice collection of strikebreakers on call, but who had lately achieved a wider notoriety when he had been jailed for an attempt to burgle the district attorney’s safe during a political investigation. I had seen him once or twice waiting for Mr. Sheer, a short, thick-set man with flat feet who smoked a black cigar and wore his hat on the back of his head. With these salient occupational characteristics, he had intensified the sinister air of our outer room as he sat in a red velvet chair and stared pugnaciously at the glittering priests’ robes on the wall. (Mr. Sheer generally had a friend waiting for him in the outer room—there were a silver forger, a racetrack tout, a typewriter salesman, a men’s tailor, a professional gambler, and there was also, of course, Billie, Mr. Sheer’s red-haired mistress who drank. He would keep them there for hours while he talked to me in the office or made phone calls or “stepped out” on mysterious errands. When he was finally ready to see them he would come out and beckon them into the inner room with that hushed, ingratiating, yet faintly sadistic air that a dentist uses to summon his patients from the anteroom. At this time, however, O’Bannon, though fully qualified by his unprepossessing appearance, was not an habitué.)
After this day, there was a lull during which O’Bannon was supposed to be looking for Carew. At length, Bierman began to call again, and soon Bierman was replaced by his lawyer, whose telephone manners were more suave but also more ominous. Still O’Bannon reported no success. I was growing frightened, and Mr. Sheer took on a hunted look; his nose stood out more sharply in his sunken face and his pale-green eyes burned with a desperate light. We stopped writing letters altogether and made no attempt to solicit business. I took to bringing a volume of Proust to the office with me, and Mr. Sheer passed the days listlessly reading the Social Register. But finally one morning Mr. Sheer brought the news that O’Bannon had got on the track of Carew’s girl. Carew himself, he said, had completely disappeared. The girl had the diamonds all right, but she demanded five hundred dollars before she would give them up. She and Carew had had a fight, Mr. Sheer said, and she maintained that Carew owed her money, and she was holding the diamonds as security.
“But the diamonds don’t belong to her,” I exclaimed. “She will have to give them up.”
Mr. Sheer shook his head sadly. “It’s just a hold-up,” he explained, with a certain worldly resignation.
“I wouldn’t do it, Mr. Sheer,” I protested. “And where are you going to get the five hundred dollars?”
For it seemed obvious to me that if Mr. Sheer had had anything salable he would already have sold it.
“Well,” he said thoughtfully, “there’s that bronze.”
“What bronze?”
“Oh, you know, Custer’s Last Stand,” he answered impatiently.
I had never heard anything of this bronze before, and it was a surprise to find Mr. Sheer dealing in Americana. His tastes in general were sumptuous and European, and while every other dealer of Mr. Sheer’s category would feature a portrait of Lincoln or a Revolutionary bedspread showing the Continental Congress, Mr. Sheer, for some reason, eschewed anything with a patriotic theme, and would even speak contemptuously of Paul Revere silver. But what I did not yet realize was that he would sell anything he could get his hands on. Now and then he would sell a live dog, and on the day I was displaying the Rembrandt in the hotel room, I was also empowered to offer an Isotta-Fraschini for a thousand dollars. And, of course, if he were telling the truth, he had been trying to sell Bierman’s diamonds.
When the colored boy had gone out and returned with a huge bronze, showing one tall American with a gun and a cowboy hat standing on a hill, surrounded by some dervish-like Indians, I could see that the work had a certain sporting character that must have attracted Mr. Sheer. But I could not imagine that it would be readily marketable. I was mistaken.
Mr. Sheer telephoned Caporello, the little white-faced Italian silver forger who spent his spare time in the outer room of our gallery.
“What are you going to do?” I said. “It would take him quite a long time to forge a copy of this thing, and besides how do you know that he can work in bronze?”
Mr. Sheer was displeased by this levity toward the bronze, which he was in the very act of admiring.
“He told me once he thought he could sell it,” he replied shortly.
When Caporello arrived, Mr. Sheer took him into the inner room, and after a time Caporello went away and then came back again, and the colored boy wrapped the bronze in brown paper and took it down in the elevator and put it in a taxi with Caporello, who drove off and was not seen again for three days.
“He’s lit out for Italy, it’s a sure thing,” Mr. Sheer would say, pacing gloomily up and down the gallery. And each time he said this we would both laugh. For Mr. Sheer had a kind of calamitous humor, which when his mishaps seemed to take on an artistic shape or unity, he would turn wryly on himself. Death was always comic for him, and even while he was telling you that so-and-so’s end was “a terrible thing,” you could see the tension with which his face was held grave and almost hear the laughter bubbling underneath. He told me once of the death of his closest friend. “He was drunk,” he said, “and dived in a swimming pool [pause, and then the explosion of laughter], but there was no water in it.” Next, with a quick recovery of sobriety, “Oh, Miss Sargent, it was a terrible thing. He broke his neck.” Another time, several years later, I came to see him in his office and found him convulsed with merriment. “You know what happened?” he said. “My best customer just dropped dead.” One of his most hilarious anecdotes concerned the death of an old man, a wealthy soap manufacturer (“Miss Sargent, he was like an uncle to me”), who met his end in a Broadway hotel, signing checks for the entire floor show of the Rainbow Restaurant, twenty or thirty strapping blondes who crowded around the deathbed, guiding the fountain pen in his failing hand.
Our doleful laughter finally penetrated to the corner where Elmer, the colored boy, had been sitting for days, brooding about his unpaid salary and a pair of field glasses that he wanted to buy for his R.O.T.C. work.
“Mr. Sheer,” he murmured, “are you worried about this Caporello? I never did trust him myself, so when I put the bronze in the cab with him I took the driver’s number.” The atmosphere of the detective story had infected us all.
Mr. Sheer was extremely proud of this quick-wittedness on Elmer’s part. “He’s a smart nigger,” he said. He even paid the boy his salary that Saturday, but was indignant when he learned that Elmer had used it to buy the field glasses, and so he did not pay him again for a long time. “That nigger played on my sympathies,” he said. “I thought I was contributing to the support of his poor old mother who does laundry.”
The cab driver, whom we reached without difficulty, had been struck by the size of Custer’s Last Stand, and recalled at once that he had taken Caporello to Tympany’s. We telephoned Tympany’s and found that the little Italian had sold them the bronze, but was not to receive the check until the following day. Mr. Sheer could just as well have intervened himself, but he wanted, he said, “to have some fun with Caporello,” so he sent O’Bannon around to Tympany’s to nab Caporello as he came out with the money. The little man was trembling like a drug addict when he arrived, under escort, at the gallery door. He took his hundred dollars’ commission and scurried gratefully away, while Mr. Sheer and O’Bannon leaned back on the sofa and had a good laugh.
Now that he had the money, it should have been simple enough to see the girl and get the diamonds. But, frightened and harried as he was, Mr. Sheer still shrank from the direct approach. In the first place, he said, O’Bannon would have to go along, and, in the second place, we would have to get someone to impersonate the owner of the diamonds. But why, I demanded. “You don’t understand how to handle these things,” he replied. He at length decided that his lady friend, Billie, who was a plump, pasty, semi-genteel matron, would be suitable for the part, and he spent the afternoon rehearsing her in the inner room. It was arranged that the three of them, O’Bannon, Billie, and Mr. Sheer, should confront the girl in her apartment the next morning.
It was almost over. My sense of relief was so great that I bought Billie two cocktails before going to dinner.
But once again, as in the case of Caporello, the human element in the plot he had constructed nearly betrayed Mr. Sheer. At nine-fifteen O’Bannon telephoned that he was sick in Flatbush and would not consider coming to town. Mr. Sheer went out to look for another detective, and the lawyer telephoned to say that he would be at police court at two in the afternoon, swearing out the warrant for Mr. Sheer’s arrest. “Without fail,” he added with satirical emphasis. Mr. Sheer came back at last with a tall, iron-gray detective who kept asserting that he knew the girl from the Starr Faithfull case, and a Negro detective who said nothing but eyed Elmer with steady suspicion. It was at this point we realized that Billie too had failed to appear. The colored detective finally found her, still drunk, in the apartment of an aviator. While we were waiting I told Mr. Sheer about the two cocktails. “It’s too bad, Miss Sargent, but you couldn’t have known it,” he said, mournfully. “She’s been on the wagon for two months and she’s a perfect lady when she’s sober.” At one o’clock I saw them all into a taxi, Billie wobbling, her eyes glazed, leaning on the arm of the colored man and trying to repeat her lines, Mr. Sheer admonishing her to try to forget them. “Don’t open your mouth, Billie,” he was saying. “When we get there, just grab a chair and sit down.”
Bierman’s lawyer was on his way downtown when they strong-armed their way into an apartment in the Fifties, and found a small, snub-nosed blonde in a maraboued negligee huddled on her bed. The girl began to scream, protesting that she had changed her mind, that five hundred dollars was not enough, that she had never seen Mr. Sheer before. The Negro detective picked her up and slung her over his shoulder, announcing that he was taking her to the Fifty-second Street police station. Billie passed out in her chair. The girl began to struggle, and the negligee slipped off first one shoulder and then the other, and finally fell to the floor. At a sign from the gray-haired man the Negro released her, Mr. Sheer produced the money, and the girl, stark-naked and sobbing, dove under her bed, where about a dozen pairs of shoes lay scattered on the dusty floor. She scrabbled about among them, like a little pug dog, Mr. Sheer said, and began to pull stockings out of the shoes, wildly, at random. With the stockings came a quantity of diamonds, rings, bracelets, pins, and clips. The spectacle so unnerved Mr. Sheer that he could not remember at first which stones were Bierman’s. Hazily he selected a few, the Negro detective picked up Billie, who could no longer walk, and they went out, leaving the girl, still weeping, crouched on the floor in the attitude of a Hindu worshiper, before the little pile of diamonds.
“I was so rattled,” Mr. Sheer said afterwards, “that it didn’t occur to me till we left the building that I should have claimed the whole outfit.”
He smiled ruefully, and shook his head.
One morning about a month later a short man with a broken nose came into the gallery.
I had nearly forgotten about the Bierman affair. For a few days after Mr. Sheer had delivered the diamonds, we had discussed it as if it were a party we had gone to. But then a neurotic schnauzer had arrived from the West, and we were back in the dog-crystal business. And when the case was finished, it was utterly finished. We never saw or heard of any of the people again. Mr. Sheer could shut off sections of his life, as a submarine can shut off compartments, and still survive. The effect was so startling as to make you believe that the sections had never been real in the first place, that not only was there no Carew, but there was no girl, there were no diamonds. But this is impossible.
I preferred at the time not to delve into Mr. Sheer’s version of the story, but to believe that he had somehow, unintentionally, got himself into a terrible quandary, and that, with my help, he had extricated himself honorably and would never lapse again. All my efforts were bent on keeping Mr. Sheer in a state of grace, and I stood guard over him as fiercely, as protectively and nervously, as if he had been a reformed drunkard. And, like the drunkard’s wife, I exuded optimism and respectability.
This particular morning Mr. Sheer was out, but the broken nose and the checked suit the visitor was wearing told me at once that he was not a customer but a friend of Mr. Sheer’s. He spoke cordially to Elmer, looked appreciatively at all the things, and asked after business. Business was all right, I said, and my character of the cheerful secretary compelled me to add, “Mr. Sheer has sold quite a few things lately!”
“Yes? I’m in the dog business myself, have been since I left the ring. People aren’t buying dogs, so I’m surprised to hear that they’re buying anything.”
There was an unanswerable skepticism in the man’s tone, and I silently began to type a letter. I could hear him walking inquisitively about.
“Say, you don’t remember a bronze he used to have? A big thing, Custer’s Last Stand, what became of it?”
Elmer coughed violently in the corner.
“Oh,” I said, happy to find myself on safe ground, “he sold that a long time ago.”
“That’s fine. I hope he got a good price for it.”
“Pretty good,” I admitted.
He left almost at once, telling me to have Mr. Sheer call him. I was proceeding with the form letter I was typing (“I want you to be among the first to see a tapestry I have just received from abroad. I enclose a photograph, which, of course, can only give you the barest notion of the beauty of the original. This remarkable medieval subject” . . .), when Elmer’s voice came weakly from the corner.
“Miss Sargent, I think I better tell you. That man is the owner of that bronze.”
My hands dropped from the keys.
“You mean that Mr. Sheer sold it and then didn’t tell him?”
Elmer nodded.
“It’s too bad,” he said, “it had to be him. He used to be the welterweight contender.”
When he heard the news, Mr. Sheer did not rebuke me. It was bound to happen, he said. But he would have to pay up instantly, and pay not the six hundred dollars he had received for it but eight, which was the value the welterweight contender had originally set on his art treasure.
“Elmer thinks he’s going to beat you up,” I said.
“No,” said Mr. Sheer, and a ruminative smile lit up his pale, sharp face. “You know, Miss Sargent, it’s a funny thing, with all the crooked things I’ve done nobody’s ever taken a sock at me. Why do you suppose that is?”
“I don’t know, Mr. Sheer,” I said sadly.
The word was out at last. I was gratified in a way that Mr. Sheer had admitted the truth, but depressed by the casual, accidental manner in which it had slipped out, as if that “crooked” were taken for granted by Mr. Sheer, accepted by him as an unalterable part of his personality. My vision of a reformed, transfigured Mr. Sheer began reluctantly to dissolve, as I perceived that there was no possibility of reform because there was no practical basis for it, because, in other words (and now I knew it), there was no merchandise. I saw the nub of Mr. Sheer’s business tragedy: he was continually being forced, by the impatience of a creditor, to sell somebody else’s property below cost. In order to make good in the Bierman case he had had to sell an eight-hundred-dollar bronze for six hundred, and to make good for the bronze he would have to sell a thousand-dollar tapestry for eight hundred, and to make good for that he would have to sell a twelve-hundred-dollar chalice for a thousand, and so on—in short, every time he sold a picture he not only ran the risk of a jail sentence, but he lost money. Of course, in reality, it was not Mr. Sheer who lost money (since he had none to lose); it was always the last creditor who was the potential loser, and if that chain of debt were ever to break, it would be the ultimate creditor who would have to bear the accumulated losses. Mr. Sheer did not allow himself to imagine that the chain could break; rather, he looked forward to a time when by a Big Sale he would loosen it voluntarily; meanwhile he clung to it as a lifebelt. “If I can only keep two jumps ahead of the sheriff, I’ll be all right,” he said.
But I could not make myself believe in the Big Sale, and the sheriff, it seemed to me, was gaining. The landlord, the telephone company, the stationers were pressing in; Elmer had not been paid and he looked sullen and hungry. We had a gallery full of objects that nobody wanted, and that, in any case, it would be criminal to sell. Billie was drunk and telephoning every fifteen minutes, threatening to commit suicide. Mr. Sheer’s jocular brutality (“Go ahead, Billie, I’m glad to hear it; I’ll give you a fine funeral”) reminded me of something I had been trying to forget, the picture of a little, white, pug-nosed chorus girl weeping and struggling in the Negro detective’s grip. The day was hot, the dog’s cage needed cleaning, and I thought that perhaps I had better quit.
But how was Mr. Sheer going to get the eight hundred dollars to pay for the bronze? I would see him through this difficulty, I resolved, and then go.
He was walking up and down in front of a very large Japanese silk screen which showed a deer hunt in progress. It had started out in life as a hanging and had been cut up into panels by Mr. Sheer himself, so that, as he said, it would not take up so much space. In spite of this mutilation, it was probably the most authentic thing we had, and all summer we had been asking twelve hundred dollars for it.
“If I marked that down to eight,” he said in a meditative tone, “Mrs. La Plante would jump at it.”
Mrs. La Plante was the lady with the toy spaniels, the widow of a theater operator, who always looked as if she were going through the customs. She dearly loved a bargain, and various merchants had so overstocked her with possessions that she wore a dozen rings, strung five or six necklaces around her neck, pinned odd bits of priceless lace at her bosom and wrists, and carried two fur stoles even on the hottest summer days. Mr. Sheer could have sold her everything in the gallery, if he had put his mind to it, sold her the things and then kept them on display, since previous purchases had left not an inch of free space in her house, and whenever she made an acquisition nowadays she simply left it with the dealer, dropping in from time to time to enjoy its beauties.
In fact, this fat old lady was the perfect customer. She was passionately hospitable with her comfortable house in Long Beach, where there was plenty to eat, plenty to drink, and a swimming pool to cool off in. Early in the summer Mr. Sheer had spent several week ends there, and it was then that those abortive negotiations for the toy spaniel crystal necklace had taken place. But all at once he had stopped going, and, though Mrs. La Plante would telephone repeatedly, he would always refuse, with a hungry nostalgia in his eyes.
At first I regarded his behavior as perverse, and used to remonstrate with him about it. Mrs. La Plante was just a bargain hunter, he would answer; a dealer had to cheat himself every time he sold her anything. I would conjure up the free meals, the drinks, and he would reply that Mrs. La Plante had too many people on the place. Naturally, Mrs. La Plante was such a Very Good Thing that Mr. Sheer was not the first nor the last to get wind of her, and it was true, as I began to notice, that Mr. Sheer was shy. He avoided strangers, particularly in large groups, and the volume of our correspondence testified to the fact that he would rather tackle a customer by mail, though this was a notoriously ineffective sales approach, than by telephone or in person. He found it still more comfortable to communicate with a customer through a letter written by someone else; in that way Mr. Sheer hardly figured in the deal at all. It was because I composed the letters that Mr. Sheer considered me invaluable as a stenographer; before my day he used to persuade a couple of elderly Country Life journalists to dictate descriptions of the new items to the girl in the office, descriptions which, as I discovered from the files, had had an odd sporting flavor. “This is a champion,” a letter would announce of a fine faïence vase.
Nevertheless, I could not believe that it was the fear of meeting all the other gentlemen of the luxury trades that kept Mr. Sheer away from Mrs. La Plante’s. Perhaps there had been some question of quid pro quo, and he had defended himself as stoutly as Hippolytus.
There was certainly something stoical about his face, as, accepting the loan of the train fare from me, he set out that week end for Long Beach.
He returned on Monday morning, hollow-eyed. Two well-dressed young men with excellent manners escorted him into the gallery. “This is Fred, Miss Sargent, and this is Ernest,” he said. “They drove me in.” In some indefinable way they seemed like a bodyguard.
“She bought the screen,” he announced when we were alone, “but, Miss Sargent, I’ll never do it again. I didn’t get a wink of sleep.”
I did not answer. I knew that what Mr. Sheer had done was absolutely necessary, yet I found myself unable to stifle my distaste.
“Oh, Miss Sargent, it was terrible,” he said, and took a long breath.
“You don’t have to tell me about it,” I said angrily.
“You mean you could see it?” he asked.
“See what?”
“About the boys . . .”
Mrs. La Plante, Mr. Sheer explained, had lately been monopolized by three young men—a dress designer, a decorator, and a real-estate operator—who were exploiting the old lady far more systematically than any previous parasites had done. It was the decorator and the real-estate man I had just met. No one before had ever been able to tolerate more than a week end at a time of Mrs. La Plante’s conversation, but the three young men were now living on the premises, doing needlework, knitting, and playing with the toy spaniels. They were not gigolos in the ordinary sense; they were just good company. To Mrs. La Plante they were her dear boys, and they in turn were fiercely possessive about the old lady, so possessive that they made a week-end visit a nightmare for an outsider. A jeweler had found a garter snake in his bed; a furrier had got a Mickey Finn; Mr. Sheer had been ducked, wearing one of his two suits, in the swimming pool—and Mrs. La Plante had been in a continuous spasm of merriment. “The boys make me young again,” she told Mr. Sheer. One by one, the ordinary merchants had dropped off. Mr. Sheer had hung on for a while, but even he could not sustain it. “They’re so petty and malicious, Miss Sargent,” he complained. “It broke my heart to see the way they were milking that innocent old lady.” When the boys had begun to demand commissions on any purchases Mrs. La Plante made, Mr. Sheer had given up.
This week end Mr. Sheer had been subjected to a more advanced form of torture. The house was bulging with the boys and their friends, with the result that Mr. Sheer had had to share a room with Fred, the decorator.
“In the same bed?” I asked.
Mr. Sheer nodded mournfully. “I was afraid to go to sleep.”
For two nights he had lain tense and watchful while the decorator tossed restlessly from side to side. In the morning, just as Mr. Sheer was dropping off, the young man had let all thirty-one toy spaniels into the room. They had jumped on the bed, and both days Mr. Sheer had waked up screaming. Mrs. La Plante had come out in a fur-trimmed dressing-gown and asked him if he had a guilty conscience.
“I’ll never do it again,” he repeated, and that afternoon he took a nap on the velvet sofa in the inner room.
But perhaps, after all, Mrs. La Plante was lonely with only the boys for company. At any rate, a few days later, she telephoned Mr. Sheer with a new project for having the toy spaniels pose in groups. With the bait dangling before him, Mr. Sheer’s resolution wilted. He went out to Long Beach for the night. Then he went out for two week ends in succession. The house was just as crowded; Mr. Sheer’s offers to sleep on the couch in the living room were politely brushed aside; so that after each visit Mr. Sheer would have to spend several afternoons napping on our musty sofa. It did not make any difference, though, for during this period, with the exception of Mrs. La Plante, we had no customers.
It was so hot indeed that even Mr. Sheer’s creditors slackened in their attentions. Having nothing else to do, Mr. Sheer let his mind play on the problem of the boys. It no longer appeared to him insuperable. His first idea was to make friends with them. They were not necessarily, he said, a closed corporation. Two weeks before he had dismissed them as nauseating creatures; now he took a more tolerant attitude. After all, they could not help it if they were born that way, he said. The effect of the friendship offensive he instantly launched was to demoralize the office. The boys overran the gallery, criticizing the objects, making long-distance calls to their entire acquaintance on the Atlantic seaboard, and harrowing the colored boy with indecent proposals. They had to be taken out to lunch whenever they were in town, and they insisted on either Maillard’s or Schrafft’s. Finally the little decorator, Mr. Sheer’s bedfellow, stole five dollars out of my purse, and I offered Mr. Sheer his choice: them or me. Mr. Sheer advised me absently not to be petty, but he began to relax his attentions to the boys, for it was plain, whatever my feelings, that the friendship offensive was not working out. The boys were using their familiarity with Mr. Sheer’s affairs to manufacture new and factually documented slanders for Mrs. La Plante’s ears. A short acquaintance with Caporello, who was timidly coming around again, inspired them to say that Mr. Sheer was a silver forger and all his pieces were copies. (So far as I know, this was not true. Certainly many of his attributions were imaginative. He would walk up and down in front of a Japanese lacquer box for a long time, with narrowed eyes, communing with it, and finally he would let a light break on his face and exclaim, perhaps for my benefit, perhaps simply for his own, “Why, that must belong to the Heian period!” From that time on, the box would be dated. But this generous exercise of the critical faculty had little in common with Caporello’s artisanship. He would have nothing to do with the modern copies of Queen Anne silver that the Italian brought around from time to time—coffee pots or tankards with the old hallmark skillfully welded on. “You can say what you want, Miss Sargent,” he told me once, “but I’d never stoop that low.” Apparently, there was some borderline, imperceptible to the normal moral eye, which he would have felt it degrading to cross; and I had hurt his feelings more than once before I learned to watch for it.)
At any rate, the more friendly Mr. Sheer became with the boys, the more chilly Mrs. La Plante’s manner grew. Mr. Sheer thought it over. He would take a leaf out of their book, he decided, and expose the boys to Mrs. La Plante. He got hold of a night-club proprietor, a former theatrical associate of the dead Mr. La Plante, and primed him to visit Mrs. La Plante and make her the following speech. “Mrs. La Plante, it has come to my ears that you are associating with Fred So-and-So, Ernest So-and-So, and another of their ilk. Mrs. La Plante, I could hardly believe it to be true when my good friend, Mr. Sheer, informed me of the fact. Mr. Sheer, of course, is an unworldly man, and he knew nothing against the boys. He told me of your friendship merely as a matter of interest. But I myself am a worldly man. I have heard of these men, and I tell you, Mrs. La Plante, Peter La Plante would turn over in his grave if he knew of this. Why, Mrs. La Plante, those men are degenerates, those men are homosexuals!”
The night-club proprietor did go out to Long Beach and faithfully delivered the warning. Unfortunately, the whole thing fell extraordinarily flat owing to the fact that Mrs. La Plante did not know what a homosexual was, and, as the night-club man pointed out later, it was no use at her age trying to tell her. After this, Mr. Sheer gave up again. For a second time, the toy spaniel necklace had to be abandoned, and the office was quiet once more.
It was about this time that the telephone was shut off. The boys with their long-distance calls had given it the coup de grâce. We carried on without it, increasing, to make up for our inaccessibility, the volume of our correspondence. But after ten days of this our stationery was used up, and the stationers declined to print any more until the bill had been paid. We were now completely cut off from the outside world, and, though Mr. Sheer finally discovered a stationer who would give him credit, a week went by while we waited for the new paper to be finished, a week during which I did nothing—it was September now, but too hot even to read in the office. When at last it came, it did not, as Mr. Sheer said, have the same quality as the old; still, he was prepared to make the best of it. I was just starting on a new series of letters when they came and took the typewriter away.
The typewriter had seemed to me the one solid, permanent object in the gallery, but this, too, did not belong to Mr. Sheer. It had been rented from an agency.
I decided to quit. The means of performing my duties no longer existed; I had been rendered impotent by creditors. Working for Mr. Sheer, moreover, had come to be a luxury for me. I had not been paid for some time, and I was supplying Mr. Sheer with a stream of nickels and dimes which he poured into the pay-telephone box in the lobby of the building. Also I had got to know Mr. Sheer so well that it was impossible for me to leave the gallery at six and carry with me the conviction that he had no way of getting a meal. So, unless one of us had another invitation, I had fallen into the habit of buying his dinner. Mr. Sheer was a connoisseur of the eighty-five-cent table d’hôte restaurants. We would eat and he would tell me stories of his past. It was not until much later that I realized how extraordinarily happy Mr. Sheer had been all through that terrible summer. At the time, I was sorry for him in the conventional way, but still I could not afford it. And, in any case, I told myself, it was just a question of time before the pack caught up with Mr. Sheer, and, somehow, I did not want to be in at the kill.
Yet, after I had quit, when I would come back to see him, Mr. Sheer would still be there, the colored boy would still be there, and, as I have said, another girl would be in my place, with another typewriter. I would always scan the building directory downstairs to see if the Savile Galleries were still listed. For a long time they were, but then one day not a week after I had seen Mr. Sheer, the name was gone, and there was no forwarding address. The lifebelt, I presumed, had broken.
But it was not quite over. More than a year later I discovered him by accident in a much larger and more impressive gallery tucked away in an arcade off Forty-seventh Street. He was still wearing the same suit, and the new gallery was like an enlargement of the old. He had taken Elmer and the red and green velvet drapes with him, the rooms were dark, and the priests’ robes glimmering down from the walls seemed exactly the same. I noticed a few horse sculptures, which were a departure, and there was a new and curious collection of Louis Quinze love seats, rented, he said, from a theatrical warehouse.
I complimented him on his new surroundings.
“I’ll be evicted any day,” he whispered.
But he was in buoyant spirits. He showed me a pocketful of summonses as another man might have flashed a bankroll. There must have been twenty of them at least. “I think they’ve got me this time,” he said, and forced his face to assume that funereal expression that he felt the decorum of his predicament required.
“People tell me I ought to go into bankruptcy. But I hate to do it now. Did you see those horse sculptures?” I nodded. “It’s a big thing, Miss Sargent, much bigger than the dogs. I’ve made a lot of wonderful new contacts, and I’d hate to go through court now. You know, Miss Sargent, there are a lot of things I wouldn’t like to have come out. Nothing wrong, you know, but . . .”
“Yes,” I said.
Two days later he was in jail. He telephoned me from there to ask if I could advance him a hundred dollars. He had failed to meet payments on a judgment against him, and the sheriff had picked him up for contempt of court.
I was sorry, I said, but I really didn’t have a hundred dollars.
“I didn’t think you would, Miss Sargent. I just thought you’d like to hear about it. There are people here that have been here for years. Mostly alimony cases. You’d get a kick out of it.”
If he could wait a day, I said, I would try to raise the money for him.
“No,” he answered doubtfully, “I don’t want to do that. There’s a kind of stigma attached to spending the night in jail. . . .”
The next day he was gone. The debt had been paid at three in the morning, they told me at the jail. I hurried up to the fine new gallery, but he was not there. A furniture van was parked out in front, the gallery door was open, and most of the hangings had been taken off the walls. The phone was ringing through the empty rooms. On an irrational, hopeful impulse I ran to answer it, thinking how providential if now at the ultimate moment this should be the Big Sale that would save him. But it was a sweet-voiced girl from the telephone company asking about the bill. I would speak to Mr. Sheer, I said; it was doubtless an oversight. I waited all afternoon, till the last familiar vase had been carted off, till they took away the chair I was sitting on, but he did not come back, and no one knew where he had gone.
Several years later, as I was coming out of a theater one night, a man touched my elbow. There was something furtive about the gesture, and I turned indignantly. I faced an apotheosis of Mr. Sheer, tall and ruddy, barbered and tailored, exuding a faint, chic fragrance of Caron’s “Pour l’Homme.” The radiant prosperity of his appearance led me to conclude at once that he had returned to that mysterious underworld from which he had come. There was a pathos of moral defeat about the idea; nevertheless, it was a relief to think that Mr. Sheer had at last ceased to strive.
But he was handing me a card he had selected from his breast pocket, and on it I read the name of a reputable antique dealer, and below it, in smaller letters, the words, I. F. SHEER, THE SPORTSMAN’S CORNER.
It was true. He took me around at midnight to see the place, and there was his private office paneled in knotty pine, his secretary’s cubbyhole next to it, and two rooms full of objects of every sort, sculptures in wood and bronze, tapestries, vases, urns, silk panels and screens, rings and earrings, book-ends and doorstops—all of them dealing with a single theme, sport through the ages. There was a Persian horse that anticipated the one that was later shown in the great Persian Exhibition; and in a glass case a gold Cretan dagger with a boar hunt on it. The medieval tapestries and the Japanese cloisonné enamels depicted various aspects of the chase, and a good-sized modern bronze showed a wrestling match in progress. “I’ve got everything,” he said in a jubilant whisper, “except an Egyptian tomb painting.” It was true. He had really covered the subject. And what was most remarkable to me was the fact that all these objects had an air of expensive authenticity. I believed in the Persian horse; I could almost believe in the dagger. He showed me over the main gallery, which was even more emphatically, quietly elegant. The collection was miscellaneous—he pointed out a dinner service that had belonged to Franz Joseph, some Pisanello medallions of the Este family, an early rosary, and a prie-dieu that he said had been used by Queen Elizabeth. Yet, ill-assorted as these objects were, they had been tellingly arranged: there was nothing here to suggest the auction room or the second-hand shop. When I had seen the gallery, he had me admire the clothes he was wearing, and they, too, were the McCoy, suit by Tripler, shirt by McLaughlin, tie by Sulka, down to the socks by Saks Fifth Avenue.
Yet there was something about that night in that dark gallery, lit only by reflectors shining down on tapestries and gold lacquer panels, about Mr. Sheer as he tiptoed from room to room on thick-piled carpets, that made me, following at his heels, feel like a prowler. All the while he was telling me how he came to be there, how the Hermitage Galleries had lifted him out of the gutter and made him a salesman, how he had sold and sold until he was head of his own department, how he would soon become a partner, all that while I had a strong sense that we had no right to be there, I was listening for the knock of the night watchman who would order us away.
His success story seemed to me incredible and I could see, by his excitement in relating it, that he found it so too. Later on, when I saw him in daylight, ingratiating with customers, man-to-man with his partners, authoritative to the office girls, I could believe it and even find reasons to justify it—he had been hired, of course, because in his way he had been a pioneer, selling bric-a-brac to rich dog and horse people who, under ordinary circumstances, could never have been induced to set foot in a dealer’s gallery. With his dog crystals he had built up a new sort of clientele, whom he now carried along with him on his great voyage of discovery. And it was precisely his character as a discoverer that endeared him to his clients, gauche and untried themselves in the mysteries of connoisseurship. How, they must have asked themselves, could this man trick us as they say art dealers do; he is too ill-informed, too naïve, in fact too much like ourselves.
But Mr. Sheer did not understand the reasons for his success, and therefore it made him uneasy. That night I could see that he, too, felt like a trespasser on those well-appointed, cultured premises, and this sense of unlawful entry filled him with both shame and pride. He was moving out of the sporting field, he said; already he was dickering for a tapestry that had been designed by Rembrandt; in the goldsmith’s field there was Cellini; in bronze, Verrocchio and Donatello. And there were even bigger things to be done. Look at the stuff Hearst had bought, whole rooms at a time. And this fellow who had made a fortune selling the Romanoff collection. . . . But as his voice rose with the great names, there was apprehension in it. The new merchandise would bring new problems. With the sporting subjects he knew where he stood: it was easy enough to demonstrate the points of a hound. But what, exactly, were the points of a Cellini?
He wanted me, he said, to teach him.
I agreed that night to give him lessons in good English, and in the jargon of art criticism, though I privately felt that it would be the ruin of his career if he ever learned how to patronize his customers.
Fortunately for Mr. Sheer, as a student he did not make rapid progress. Our lessons would take place at lunch, at dinner, at the theater, or, often, late at night or on Sunday afternoon, in the dark, empty gallery. I tried to teach him terms like Byzantine and baroque, but, as I soon discovered, he was chiefly interested in acquiring a string of hyperbolical adjectives to describe his stock. And it was more important to him to learn how to pronounce Longchamps correctly than to memorize the parts of speech.
It was something different from good English, I began to realize, that he wanted from me.
When he passed into the final stage of his business development and became a partner, Mr. Sheer achieved his ambition—to enter a rich man’s house by the front door, as a guest. First there had been stag evenings with visiting Middle Western businessmen, but before long, at Aiken, at Palm Beach, on Long Island, Mr. Sheer would now and then be included in the larger cocktail parties. Deeply as he desired these invitations, he could only enjoy them in anticipation and in retrospect. The parties themselves were torture for him. His fear of committing a solecism combined with his shyness in crowds to bleach his conversation to an unnatural neutrality. On the offensive, he restricted himself to the most general statements about politics, the weather, the women’s dresses, the state of business; on the defensive, he held off his interlocutor with all the Really’s and You-don’t-say’s and the Well-isn’t-that-interesting’s of the would-be Good Listener.
Still, this was the apogee of his career, and he knew it. What puzzled him, what at first he could hardly believe, was the fact that he was unhappy. He grew more and more dependent on the evenings we would spend together, exchanging stories of the disreputable old days. “Margaret,” he would tell me, “it’s a funny thing, but you’re the only person I have a good time with any more.” He explained this by saying that he could “be himself” with me, but there was more to it than that. For one thing, I was dear to him because I was the only one who knew. In my mind he could see as in his own the two Mr. Sheers, the pale, perspiring Mr. Sheer of the past and the resplendent Mr. Sheer of the present. The wonderful, miraculous contrast was alive in me as it was in no one else. What was becoming infinitely saddening to him in his own success story was that he could never allow anyone to know what a success story it was. The old Mr. Sheer had to be kept under cover, and his new friends could only presume that the present Mr. Sheer had sprung full-blown from the head of the Hermitage Galleries.
Moreover, though in the first flush of success, at the time of his greatest happiness, the two Mr. Sheers must have been equally alive and equally vigorous, now in the daily atmosphere of respectability, the old Mr. Sheer was atrophying. Mr. Hyde had turned into Dr. Jekyll, and it required the strongest drugs to get him to go back to his original state. The reminiscences we exchanged were but one of the drugs. Mr. Sheer tried a number of other methods.
In the first place, as I have said, he liked to haunt the gallery out of business hours. Where he had once felt genuinely like a trespasser, he now tried to revive that feeling by imitating the behavior that went with it. But no policeman, no Holmes Protective man, ever halted him, no matter what time of night he came, for now the Fifty-seventh Street police knew him and greeted him with respect.
He produced another imitation of his former character by moving back and forth from one hotel to another. One week he would be at the St. Regis, the next at the Gotham, the next at the Weylin, and so on, until he had made the rounds of the second-string fashionable hotels, when he would start over again. But this elusiveness was synthetic, for now his secretary could always find him. His position as a successful man required that.
In the same way, he would try to inject a little color into his business life by the practice of minor chicaneries. Any large-scale operations were out of the question, for the bookkeeper kept the accounts and handled the money. But he could concoct fabulous histories of the pieces he sold, could suppress an undesirable attribution, could add a signature where none had been before, and happily obliterate what he felt were picayune distinctions between period replicas and originals by a master. He could also reveal business confidences and make promises that were impossible to keep. If he could have had his way, every sale would have been a little conspiracy: in his eyes, the price being equal, it was better to sell a Gobelin tapestry as a Beauvais than to sell it as a Gobelin. I have even watched him trying to persuade himself (and this was the inevitable first step in the process of deception) that a Degas bronze was not a Degas at all, but a Rodin.
Yet, like his personal elusiveness, this slipperiness in business was largely unreal. In the first place, it was unnecessary: he had reached a point in his career where the things he handled could be sold on their merits. In the second place, though it should have been dangerous, though indeed he desired it to be dangerous, his secretary and his partners kept a diligent watch over him to prevent him from hurting himself. They were always ready to intervene with “Mr. Sheer made a mistake, he has so many things on his mind, we will correct the error.” He was in the position of a rich kleptomaniac whose family is perpetually on hand to turn her thefts into purchases.
As time passed, it became increasingly difficult for Mr. Sheer to regard his life as an imposture. He still believed that he could “be himself” with me, but actually our conversations were more and more taken up with politics, the weather, the women’s dresses, the state of business, till the outlaw Mr. Sheer I dined with was practically indistinguishable from the Mr. Sheer one met at the gallery or at a hunt breakfast somewhere in New Jersey. It was plain, at last, that Mr. Sheer had not imposed on the business world and used it for his own delight, but that the business world had used Mr. Sheer, rejecting the useless or outmoded parts of him. He had not, as he first thought, outwitted anybody, but he had somehow, imperceptibly, been outwitted himself.
Yet masquerade was life to Mr. Sheer. He could not bear to succeed in his own personality, any more than an unattractive woman can bear to be loved for herself. So he began, indirectly, unwittingly, to try to fail. It was distressing to watch him, for even here he was conforming to the conventions of the businessman’s world. This Mr. Sheer who had once hunted danger, joyously, down a hundred strange byways, was now walking glumly down a well-trodden road into the jaws of a respectable ruin.
He had a love affair with his best client’s wife, and he played the stock market. Both of these ventures he pursued with a terrible listlessness. He could hardly bother to follow his stocks in the newspaper, or to telephone the lady for whom he was risking so much. It was only when his broker sold him out, and when he brought the lady home to her husband with her evening dress wrong-side-out, that his spirits revived, and he would dwell on the two misfortunes with his old rueful delight.
The Hermitage Galleries, however, saw him through, and the client, who had been looking for a pretext to break with his wife, readily forgave him. Mr. Sheer grew more despondent than ever, and his health began to worry him. He had a masseur in the morning, and he went to a gymnasium in the evening; he subjected himself to basal-metabolism tests, urinalyses, blood counts, took tonics to pep him up and bromides to quiet him and was still, unaccountably, tired. Last year they took out his appendix and his teeth; when he recovered, he had not lost that daily, dragging fatigue, but only acquired an appetite for the knife.
I saw him off to the hospital recently to have his gall bladder removed.
“It’s a very dangerous operation, Margaret; it may be the death of me,” he said.
And for the first time in many weeks he giggled irrepressibly.
*An extract from memoirs begun by the heroine.