What’s ‘sexy-casual’? Fernanda asks herself, leaving her friends – or as close as she’s ever going to get to friends – logging on to dating sites. She opens her closet and toggles through the hangers and in a minute, she’s back, wearing slacks and a white silk shirt.
“Omigod, you look much too glamorous,” Marcia says. “Everything you put on looks glamorous, if you want the truth. Don’t you have any jeans? In that thing you’re wearing now, they’ll be too intimidated to write.”
Distractedly, Courtney looks up from her laptop.
“Yeah. Like tight jeans and a turtleneck, maybe?”
Fernanda runs back to the closet and pulls on a brown-flecked turtleneck sweater and sexy-ish skinny jeans. The jeans look too new. But then, they are. She’s worked hard at looking her age.
“How’s this? Better?”
“Awesome,” Marcia says, whipping out her cell phone and clicking away.
“Smile! Smile, Fernanda! Try to look intelligent, but playful and incredibly seductive.”
Fernanda smiles.
Courtney beckons her over to the desk.
“There are three good sites I’m going to put you on. We’ll fill out the basic stuff now, but you’ll have to go back later and do the essay sections yourself.”
“Essays?” Fernanda asks, uneasily. “Essays about what?”
“Oh, they want you to write a lot of bullshit about how much you like to run barefoot on the beach and stuff.” Marcia says. “You can make it all up, if you want. That’s what guys do. At least the guys who’ve contacted me.”
Courtney snorts.
“Great,” Fernanda says, finishing her wine. “I’m really pretty good at bullshit. Anyone want some more?”
No one in Old Masters feels completely comfortable about accepting a painting from just a photo in an email, which is why, for important-looking paintings with established pedigrees, major rainmakers pack their beat-up bags and fly off to Maine or South America or Burgundy to be eyes- and hands-on – to bring some thunderstorms home. The senior staff taxis out to Kennedy regularly at merely the whiff of a Titian: even a Gainsborough, if it looks good. Now and then, however, the department gets lucky and an owner can be convinced to ship his pictures out to Berger’s at his own expense.
Everyone knows, however, that there are scores of superb collections right here in Manhattan, although they’re not often for sale. Especially when the Old Masters market is “off,” as it is right now. That’s why, when inventory is down, Fernanda might be asked to make cold calls to encourage consignments. To drum up merch, as Richard likes to say. (Merch, he calls these paintings, shocking her, sort of. And she hates making those calls.)
But there are times when collectors want to trade up, which is nice. Or need to cover a loss. Or buy the second wife a jet. That’s when Berger’s can pick up something choice: pictures well-known to the art world, which, unsurprisingly, keeps handy, sub rosa tabs on who owns everything and where everything is. And now and then, to have things to sell, they need to make a phone call to an owner and have someone knowledgeable run over to Park or Fifth to see that the paint hasn’t fallen off the canvas or it hasn’t been overcleaned. Once in a while, instead of just making the phone call, Fernanda’s allowed to tag along. It reminds her yet again of how much there is to know. And she’s beginning to understand that, no matter how many paintings she looks at, how many museums she haunts (and she does) or how experienced she eventually becomes, she will never know enough. So when her bargain with Randi is fulfilled – after she’s met her beloved and had her child – she’d love to work at Berger’s for years and years and years. That prospect makes her unimaginably happy.
CHAPTER 12
Towards the end of July, Peregrine Middleditch, having spent six of his thirty-five years at Berger’s in Marketing, eight in Appraisals, nine in Rugs, and the remainder as Senior Specialist in the Old Master department, tracks Fernanda down in the cubicle, where, exhausted, she’s checking final catalogue entries. From the doorway, he casually suggests she accompany him this coming Thursday to a client visit on Long Island.
“I suspect,” he says dryly, “there may be one or two things there for you.”
She can scarcely contain her joy. A day in the country. Like a field trip at school. And the promise of interesting art. Just what – unwittingly – she’s been needing.
But on Thursday, she discovers to her dismay that the ride to Locust Valley is very much longer than she’d imagined. Long Island is “Long” Island for a reason, it seems, although the ride seems long in no small part because Peregrine has turned out to be, not a conversationalist, but a lecturer.
“You know,” he’s saying now, not taking his eyes from the road, “we’re about to see one of those genuine old North Shore estates, the kind we seldom get anymore. J.P. Morgan-era money. This is a Morgan-era collection, in fact. Pretty much untouched, too. Did you know that?
Fernanda nods, although she did not know, in fact. Along with many of his fellow Brits, her companion seems to be fascinated by America’s Old Money and America’s pseudo-aristocracy. It has something to do, she imagines, with the way New Money so effortlessly turns to Old Money here.
Fernanda nods mechanically once again and looks over at Peregrine. She’s recently discovered that, despite the polished grooming of these art world heavyweights, despite their elocutions, their airs, they’re actually businessmen in disguise. And so notwithstanding her companion’s hauteur and his suave Bond Street suit, his quiet gold cufflinks, his tea-stained teeth and his distant, but much-mentioned relationship to a second cousin of the Spencers (who “as everyone knows, are an older family than the Windsors”), Peregrine is, to put it politely, a shark.
Who can’t seem to stop expounding.
“Matthew Parkinson, from Furniture – you know Matthew, don’t you? – he told me that this house has something like fifty rooms. Plus outbuildings. With every room fairly awash in goodies.” The corners of his mouth tremble with barely contained desire. “And the current owner was born there, I understand, and his family has owned it since the … oh, third-quarter-nineteenth century.” His eyes still glued to the road, he adds, “Old for here, of course.” He sniffs. “In any case, I think – I hope – we’re going to see wonderful paintings.”
He fumbles a patterned handkerchief from his inside jacket pocket and dabs at his forehead and the damp peripheries of his pompadour. The air conditioning in the rented car is barely keeping up.
“So, when he phoned us a couple of weeks ago, he explained that with his wife gone now – I don’t know if she’s died or decamped – he wanted to sell some of his better things and have us appraise some other things for his children. I think there are two – children, that is – but they’re grown and gone. Which is usually good.” A faint, conspiratorial smirk. “I can’t guarantee there’ll be anything in your so-called area of expertise. We’ll hope there will be. But Charles thought I’d need you to take notes and measurements, in any case. And to look decorative.” Peregrine glances over at her for the first time. “Which you do.”
The compliment catches Fernanda off-guard. Like so many of her colleagues at Berger’s, Peregrine is gay, and she’d never imagined that gay men notice women’s looks. On the other hand – Peregrine accepted – it seems that all the kind and sensitive men she’s met since she’s been here are gay, starting with Richard Sinclair. The most talented, too.
Fernanda becomes aware of a silence in the car. He must, at last, be talked-out. But maybe she should give some serious thought to being artificially inseminated by a gay man. It would certainly make the baby part so much easier.
She looks sidewise at Peregrine, conjecturing. He’s driving well below the speed limit and whistling tunelessly through pale, pursed lips. Not Peregrine. No. Really. No.
The Howell house has a name. A modest black-and-gold sign at the head of the drive informs them they’re at last approaching Clifton. Which is not at all what Fernanda has imagined
it would be, because, while it may very well have fifty-plus rooms, it’s far – really far – from grand. Nothing, say, like Robert Redford’s Gatsby house, or Leonardo DiCaprio’s Gatsby house, or even Hepburn’s Philadelphia Story manse. It’s nothing like anything she’d always imagined old Long Island would look like. Instead, Clifton appears to meander beneath thick-limbed maples and conifers like some overgrown New England farm house. It’s covered in white clapboard cladding that’s sorely in need of paint, and its unprepossessing front entrance seems swallowed in a riot of weeds. Those weeds, plus a mossy flagstone walk, send a message that the formal entrance to this house is rarely used, and so, after a moment’s indecision, Peregrine eases the car around the gravel drive to park in the shade, at the back. They clamber out stiffly and rearrange their wrinkled clothes. When Peregrine’s unable to find a doorbell, he tries the small brass knocker.
The back door is opened by their host, somewhat tousled and flushed, in a damp white polo shirt and tennis shorts.
“Did you have trouble finding us? That fence. I know. Damned fence makes us hard to see. I’m Clary Howell.” A calloused brown hand is thrust at Peregrine, who fields it manfully.
“Peregrine Middleditch.”
Clary Howell flicks strands of peppery hair off his forehead, and wiping his hand on the seam of his shorts, he offers it to Fernanda deferentially.
“Forgive these duds, will you? I just got back from the club and haven’t had time to change. You are …?”
“Fernanda Turner.”
He seems to barely register her at all, which is novel these days.
A yellowed tennis sweater drapes his shoulders like some beloved, ancient cat, and Fernanda thinks she might have seen a sweater like that once, in a glossy ad. But she’s never met anyone who’s worn one.
Their host throws open the narrow back door and, his visitors behind him, strides into a spacious center hall where Peregrine and Fernanda automatically slow, to covertly inspect the walls. Dismayingly, the hall appears to be empty of everything except elaborately scabbarded swords and overly sweet eighteenth-century engravings, all casually hung with collections of warped wooden tennis rackets.
Their host wonders if they’d like to wash up? Or, perhaps, have something to drink, but his visitors decline. They need to see more walls.
“Why don’t you drop your things then and come along,” he pleasantly suggests. “You probably want to get right to my stuff. I hope you can flog it for me.”
Fernanda and Peregrine trail him into a living room larger than the entire footprint plus the whole front yard of her St. Louis house. She can only stare. The room’s blue silk-damask walls are almost entirely obscured by overpowering encrustations of gilt-wood frames. She thinks she spots a possible Le Brun between the windows, and above the mantel there’s a definite de La Tour. Clary Howell tosses his sweater on the back of a dainty armchair.
“Really. Can’t I talk you into some iced tea? I’m going to have some myself.”
“Well, I suppose …” Peregrine says.
“Terrific. And you, Fernanda? Can I twist your arm?”
There’s something magnetic about him, despite his age, which must be seventy-plus. Something of a ladies’ man, perhaps, despite his almost ignoring her. And he has wonderful manners too, she thinks. And so, if only not to disappoint this vital, cordial man, she answers, yes, she’d love some tea. But really, she doesn’t want anything real to drink at all. She needs to drink in these walls.
“I’ll go tell Norah.”
When he leaves, Peregrine crosses the vast Persian carpet and stage-whispers:
“Can you believe this? I smell seventeenth century. Absolutely.”
Fernanda stifles a laugh and twitches her nose like a cat.
“Fifteenth, sixteenth and eighteenth, too!”
When he returns they follow their host, meek as historic-house tourists, as he leads them from the living room to the dark and formal dining room with its painted screen blocking off the pantry door, and there, they mentally tick off a Constable and three small Turner watercolors. They follow him into the paneled library with its head-high fireplace, to the tiled solarium and a paper-strewn downstairs office. His untasted tea in his hand, Peregrine murmurs compliments and drops some local names along the way: he knows this Locust Valley neighbor; he’s visited that polo-playing friend. But his nose for art is exquisite and even more sensitive than hers, of course. She watches as he snuffles out, not just a Dolci, a Van Loo, and a Hals, but even – she sees his eyes glaze with avarice – a good size could-be-Rembrandt. They arrive at last at the second floor, and in one of the upstairs rooms, Fernanda takes a detour to inspect a nice-size Venetian canal scene – out of her period, really (her period! She grins.) In the calm waters of its lower right corner, she sees it bears the spidery signature of Guardi. This house is a small museum.
In the fifth or sixth bedroom, Clary Howell leans against the mantel and tells his tale.
“My great-grandfather – whom I never knew, of course – was in steel, a contemporary of Morgan and Frick. And though he certainly wasn’t as rich as they were – Lord, I wish he had been – he seems to have made a great effort to buy whatever they were buying. When I was a boy, actually, I remember the old man being really proud of all this,” with a sweep of his arm, he takes in the art and the house, “and like his father before him, inviting important appraisers to come out here every few years to update these things for insurance. I have all the old appraisals, if you’d like to see them. ”
They nod in delighted unison.
“The old man” he calls his father. So … dated. Fernanda thinks. She savors the phrase and tucks it away.
“And then, when the old man died,” he goes on, “my brother came up from South Carolina and said he only wanted one thing. Out of all this stuff and these pictures, just one thing. I couldn’t believe it. Although,” Clary Howell has an unusually high-pitched tenor voice. It seems anomalous in such a big, athletic-looking man, but just now, it darkens, infused with humor and regret. “It turned out it was a big thing. Used to hang over the dining-room fireplace. The Raphael.”
Beside her, Peregrine buckles slightly and takes a comforting sip of tea. Fernanda’s ice cubes tinkle empathetically.
“Well, the things you still have are wonderful,” he manages, his staunch Brit accent lending weight, if not conviction, to his words, “Have you given any thought to which of these, er – remaining works – you’d like to have us sell?”
Abruptly, Clary Howell checks his watch, and scrambles in the pockets of his shorts and pulls out what looks like a green plastic whistle. Apologetically waving the lanyard in their direction, he hurries from the room, heading for the stairs, his voice floating back behind him.
“Wait one sec, if you don’t mind, it’s time to feed the dogs. I just have to get them in.”
Within seconds, they hear a deafening bark. Then another. And in less than a minute, a trio of brown-and-white spaniels has bounded up the stairs to hurl themselves joyously at Peregrine’s soft lapels. Peregrine steps self-protectively backward before cowering behind a corner chair, and foiled, the spaniels turn to Fernanda. Then they stop – seemingly confused. Ears flattened and tails tucked between their be-nettled and matted hocks, the spaniels tumble over one another in their haste to leave the room. Fernanda has knelt to welcome them all, but bewildered now, she gets to her feet.
“Well, I can’t say I’ve ever seen them do that before,” says Clary Howell from the door. “Cuddled a skunk lately?”
Peregrine, brushing peevishly at his barely rumpled trousers, comes out from behind his chair, but Fernanda tries for a breezy laugh.
“Well, I guess they just don’t like me, Mr. Howell. And I love dogs, too. Must be my perfume. Or something on my clothes, maybe? Or maybe a something – a scent or a sense. She remembers Marcia’s dog.”
She’s going to cry, but makes a brave effort not to.
“What is this over here?” she asks
much too brightly, and hastens across the hall to a small dark den where, her cheeks aflame, she pretends to be absorbed in a small English watercolor.
Oh, but she’s never seen anything like that before either. She’s always been an animal-lover, and animals have seemed to know that. Fernanda leans against a bookcase to wait out the thrumming in her ears. Faintly, from across the hall, she can hear the men discussing … shooting, she thinks. And dogs.
Yellow dogs.
She turns to the nearest bookcase for distraction.
It’s a house that’s surprisingly full of books. Even in most of the bedrooms, each one decorated in a worn hodgepodge of family relics and puppy-chewed rugs, there are, not merely Sargent drawings (not their department) and a Brueghel the Younger landscape (very much their department), but shelf after shelf of old books. Alphabetically arranged by subject and author, she notices now.
Forgotten for the moment, she hopes, Fernanda tries to browse. There’s a good deal of philosophy – Hume and Sartre and Wittgenstein, Goethe and Marlowe, she notes – but along with these, there are numerous books here on sports. Not self-help books, either – although she sees one or two how-tos on tennis and golf – but mainly, there are eighteenth-century leather-bound books on subjects like the art of fly-fishing or, even more esoteric, some lavishly engraved treatises on swordsmanship and side-saddle horsemanship. There are well-thumbed books on early farming and Long Island history and down there, on a low shelf, what looks to Fernanda like a first edition of Catcher in the Rye. (She was eleven, perhaps, when she borrowed it from the St. Louis bookmobile.) Faulkner stands spine to spine with Fitzgerald, naturally, and kneeling, to examine the bottom-most shelves, she discovers a score of gorgeous gold-tooled volumes on music, ballet and an entire section on opera, even a magnificently bound and illustrated score of Gounod’s Faust. But her eye is caught by the books on film on the opposite wall: five shelves of them, at least. So he isn’t just a jock – not that jocks are bad. But Clary Howell – or someone who’s been living in this house – is clearly, widely read.
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