by Irwin Shaw
“Tell me, Miles,” Evelyn said as we were finishing our coffee, “in the war were you a colonel? I asked Douglas and he said he didn’t know.”
“Heavens no, dear girl,” he laughed. “I was the lowliest of lieutenants.”
“I was sure you were a colonel,” Evelyn said. “At least a colonel.”
“Why?”
“No particular reason,” Evelyn said carelessly. She put her hand on mine on the table. “Just a kind of air of commanding the troops.”
“It’s a trick I learned, dear Evelyn,” Fabian said, “to cover up my essential lack of self-confidence. Would you like a brandy?”
When he had paid the bill, he wouldn’t hear of our driving all the way to take him to his hotel in Southampton. “And tomorrow morning,” he said to me, “don’t bother to get up early. I have to be in New York by noon and the hotel will find a limousine for me.
As the taxi drove up to the restaurant, now half-obscured by fog rolling in from the bay, he said, “What a lovely evening. I hope we will have many such. If I may, Gentle Heart …” I did not miss the echo … “If I may …” He leaned toward Evelyn. “I would love to kiss this dear girl good night.”
“Of course,” she said, not waiting for my permission, and kissed him on the cheek.
We watched him get into the taxi and the red taillights faded wetly into the fog.
“Whew!” Evelyn said, reaching for my hand.
That night and the next morning I was glad Fabian was in a hotel and not in Evelyn’s house.
He did not make it to the wedding, as he was in England that week. But he sent a superb Georgian silver coffeepot as a gift from London, hand-carried by a stewardess he knew. And when our son was born, he sent five gold napoleons from Zurich, where he happened to be at the time.
24
THE SOUND OF HAMMERING woke me up. I looked at the clock on the bedside table. It was six forty. I sighed. Johnson, the carpenter who was working on the new wing of the house, insisted upon giving you what he called an honest day’s work for your money. Evelyn stirred in the bed beside me, but did not awake. She was breathing softly, the covers half-thrown back, her breasts bare. She looked delicious lying there, and I would have liked to make love to her. But she was cranky in the morning, and besides, she had worked late the night before on a brief she had brought home from the office with her. Later, I promised myself.
I got out of bed and parted the curtains to see what the weather was like. It was a fine summer morning and the sun was already hot. I put on a pair of bathing trunks and a terry-cloth bathrobe, got a towel, and left the room, barefooted and silent, congratulating myself for having had the good sense to marry a woman who came complete with a house on a beach.
Downstairs, I went into the guest room, which was now transformed into a nursery. I could hear Anna, the girl who looked after the baby, moving around in the kitchen. The baby was in his crib, gurgling over his morning bottle. I stared down at him. He looked rosy, serious, and vulnerable. He didn’t resemble either Evelyn or myself; he just looked like a baby. I didn’t try to analyze my feelings as I stood beside my son, but when I went out of the room, I was smiling.
I turned the bolt on the second lock that I had installed on the front door when I moved in with Evelyn. She had said that it was unnecessary, that in all the time she and her parents had the house there never had been any trouble. So far there had been no uninvited guests, but I still made certain the bolt was in place each night before I went to bed.
Outside, the lawn was wet with dew, cool and agreeable on my bare feet. “Good morning, Mr. Johnson,” I said to the carpenter, who was putting in a window frame.
“Good morning, Mr. Grimes,” Johnson said. He was a formal man and expected to be treated formally. The rest of the building crew wouldn’t arrive until eight, but Mr. Johnson had told me he preferred working alone and that his early-morning labor, when nobody was around to bother him, was the best part of the day. Evelyn said the real reason he started so early was that he enjoyed waking people up. He had a Puritanical streak and didn’t approve of sluggards. She had known him since she was a little girl.
The new wing was almost finished. We were going to move the nursery into it and there would be a library where Evelyn could work and keep some books. Up to now she had had to work on the dining-room table. She had an office in town, but the phone was always ringing there, she said, and she couldn’t concentrate. She had a secretary and a clerk, but she always seemed to have more work than she could comfortably handle between nine in the morning and six at night. It was amazing how much litigation went on in this peaceful part of the world.
I circled the house and crossed to the edge of the bluff. The bay stretched out below me, glittering and calm in the morning sunlight. I went down the flight of weathered wooden steps to the little beach. I took off the bathrobe and took a deep breath and ran into the water. It was still early in July and the water was shockingly cold. I swam out a hundred yards and then back and came out tingling all over and feeling like singing aloud. I took off my trunks and toweled myself dry. There was nobody else on the whole stretch of beach at that hour to be offended by momentary male nudity.
Back in the house, I turned on the kitchen radio for the early news as I made myself breakfast. There was speculation in Washington that President Nixon was going to be forced to resign. I thought of David Lorimer and his farewell party in Rome. I sat at the kitchen table and drank my fresh orange juice and lingered over bacon and eggs, toast and coffee. I pondered on the special, marvelous taste of breakfasts that you made for yourself on a sunny morning. In the fourteen months since we had been married, I had become addicted to domesticity. Often, when Evelyn came home tired from the office, I prepared dinner for both of us. I had made Evelyn swear never to tell this to a soul, especially not to Miles Fabian. On his subsequent visits, after the first touchy evening on which they had met, Evelyn and he had come to terms. They would never be friends, but they were not unfriendly.
Fabian had been in East Hampton for three weeks, helping me get ready for the opening. Early in the year, he had gone to Rome and had gotten in touch with Angelo Quinn and made a contract with him for all his output. He had done the same thing with the man whose lithographs he had bought in Zurich. Then he had come out to Sag Harbor and outlined a scheme that I had thought was insane at first, but which, surprisingly, Evelyn had approved of. The plan was to open a gallery in nearby East Hampton and have me run it. “You’re not doing anything, anyway,” he said, which was true at the time, “and I’ll always be available to help you when you need it. You have a lot to learn, but you certainly picked a winner with Quinn.”
“I bought two paintings for my girl,” I said. “I didn’t intend to start a career.”
“Have I steered you wrong up to now?” he demanded.
“No,” I admitted. Among the other things on which he had not steered me wrong, like gold and sugar and wine and Canadian zinc and lead and the land in Gstaad (the chalet would be built by Christmas and every apartment had been rented), there was also Nadine Bonheur’s dirty movie, which had been playing to full houses for seven months, in New York, Chicago, Dallas, and Los Angeles amid cries of shame in church publications. Our names, happily, were not on anything connected with the picture except the checks we received each month. And they went directly to Zurich. My bank balances, both open and secret, were impressive, to say the least. “No,” I said, “I can’t say that you’ve steered me wrong up to now.”
“This area is rich in three things,” Fabian went on, “money, potatoes, and painters. You could have five shows a year just with local artists and you still wouldn’t begin to tap the total product. People are interested in art here and they have the dough to invest in it. And it’s like Palm Beach—people are on vacation and are free with their money here. You can get double the price for a picture that you’d have to sweat to get off the wall in New York. That’s not to say that we’d just stick with this one place. W
e’ll start modestly and see how it goes, of course. After that, we could look into the possibilities of Palm Beach, say, Houston, Beverly Hills, even New York. You wouldn’t be against spending a month or so in Palm Beach in the winter, would you?” he asked Evelyn.
“Not completely,” Evelyn said. “No.”
“What’s more, Douglas,” he said, “it would launder a reasonable portion of your money for the tax hounds. You were the one who wanted to live in the States and they’re bound to come after you. You could throw open your books and sleep at night. And you’d have a legitimate reason to travel in Europe, on the search for talent. And while you were in Europe you could make the occasional necessary visit to your money there. And, finally, for once you could do something for me.”
“For once,” I said.
“I don’t expect gratitude,” Fabian said aggrievedly, “but I do expect normal civility.”
“Listen to the man,” Evelyn said. “He’s making sense.”
“Thank you, my dear,” Fabian said. Then, to me, “You don’t object if something that is in both our interests happens to be a project that is dear to my heart, do you?”
“Not necessarily,” I said.
“You can be ungracious, can’t you?” he said. “Nevertheless—permit me to go on. You know me. You’ve tagged along with me through enough museums and galleries to have some notion of what I think about art. And artists. And not just what they mean in terms of money. I like artists. I would have liked to be one myself. But I couldn’t. And the next best thing is to be mixed up with them, help them, gamble on my taste, maybe one day discover a great one.” Part of this may have been true, part pure rhetoric, for the purpose of persuading me. I doubted if Fabian could have distinguished which was which himself. “Angelo Quinn is good enough,” he went on, “but maybe one day some kid will walk in with a portfolio and I’ll say, ‘Now I can give up everything else. This is it, this is what I’ve been waiting for.’”
“Okay,” I said. I had known from the beginning I couldn’t hold out against him. “You’ve convinced me. As usual. I’ll devote my life to the building of the Miles Fabian museum. Where do you want it? How about down the hill from the Maeght Museum in St.-Paul-de-Vence?”
“Wilder things have happened,” Fabian said soberly.
We had rented a barn on the outskirts of East Hampton, painted it, cleaned up the interior, and put up our sign—The South Fork Gallery. I had refused to put my name on it. I wasn’t quite sure whether my refusal was influenced by modesty or fear of ridicule.
Now, Fabian would be waiting for me there at nine o’clock that morning, surrounded by thirty paintings by Angelo Quinn that we had spent four days hanging on the barn walls. The invitations to the opening of the show had gone out two weeks in advance and Fabian had promised free champagne to about a thousand of his best friends who were in the Hamptons for the summer and we had arranged for two policemen to handle the parking problem.
I was finishing a second cup of coffee when the telephone rang. I went into the hall and picked it up. “Hello,” I said.
“Doug,” a man’s voice said, “this is Henry.”
“Who?”
“Henry. Hank. Your brother, for God’s sake.”
“Oh,” I said. I had called him when I got married but hadn’t seen or spoken to him since. He had written to me twice to say that the business still looked promising, which I took to mean that it was about to go under. “How are you?”
“Fine, fine,” he said hurriedly. “Listen, Doug, I’ve got to see you. Today.”
“I’ve got an awfully busy day, Hank. Can’t it …?”
“It can’t wait. Look, I’m in New York. You can get here in two hours. …”
I sighed. I hoped inaudibly. “Not possible, Hank,” I said.
“Okay. I’ll come out there.”
“I’m really jammed …”
“You’re going to eat lunch, aren’t you?” he said accusingly. “Christ, you can spare an hour every two years for your brother, can’t you?”
“Of course, Hank,” I said.
“I can be there by noon. Where do I meet you?”
I gave him the name of a restaurant in East Hampton and told him how to find it.
“Great,” he said.
I hung up. This time I sighed aloud.
I went upstairs and dressed.
Evelyn was just getting out of bed and I kissed her good morning. For once she wasn’t cranky at that hour. “You smell salty,” she whispered as I held her. “Deliciously salty.” I slapped her fondly on her bottom and told her I was busy for lunch, but that I’d call her later and tell her how things were going.
As I drove toward East Hampton I decided that I could give Hank ten thousand dollars. At the most, ten thousand. I wished he had chosen another day to call.
Fabian was prowling around the gallery, giving little touches to the paintings to straighten them, although they all looked absolutely straight to me. The girl from Sarah Lawrence we had hired for the summer was taking champagne glasses out of cases and arranging them on the trestle table we had set up at one end of the barn. The champagne would be delivered in the afternoon by the caterer Fabian had hired. The two paintings from our living room were on the walls. Fabian had put little red sold tabs on them. “To break the ice,” he had explained. “Nobody likes to be the first one to buy. Tricks in every trade, my boy.”
“I don’t know what I’d do without you,” I said.
“Neither do I,” he said. “Listen, I’ve been thinking.”
I recognized the tone. He was coming up with a new scheme.
“What is it now?” I asked.
“We’re underpricing,” he said.
“I thought we’d been through all that.” We had spent days discussing prices. We had settled on fifteen hundred dollars for the larger oils and between eight hundred and a thousand for the smaller ones.
“I know we talked about it. But we set our sights too low. We were too modest. People will think we don’t have any real confidence in the man.”
“What do you suggest?”
“Two thousand for the big ones. Between twelve and fifteen hundred for the smaller ones. It’ll show we’re serious.”
“We’ll wind up the proud owners of thirty Angelo Quinns,” I said.
“Trust my instinct, my boy,” Fabian said grandly. “We’re really going to put our friend on the map tonight.”
“It’s a good thing he won’t be here,” I said. “He’d swoon.”
“It’s a pity the young man wouldn’t come. Give him a haircut and a shave and he’d be most personable. Useful for lady art lovers.” Fabian had offered to pay Quinn’s way across from Rome for the show, but Quinn had said he wasn’t finished painting America yet. “So,” Fabian said, “two thousand it is, right?”
“If you say so,” I said. “I’ll hide in the john when anybody asks what anything costs.”
“Boldness is all, dear boy,” Fabian said. “The breaks are coming our way. I was at a party last night and the art critic from The Times was there. He’s down for the weekend. He promised to look in tonight.”
I felt my nerves grow taut. Quinn had only gotten two lines in an Italian paper for his show in Rome. They had been appreciative, but they had only been two lines. “I hope you know what you’re doing,” I said. “Because I don’t.”
“The man will be stunned,” Fabian said confidently. “Just look around you. This old barn is positively glowing.”
I had looked so hard and so long at the paintings that I no longer had any reaction to them. If it had been possible, I would have driven out to the far edge of the island at Montauk Point and stayed there looking at the Atlantic Ocean until the whole thing was over.
There was a tinkle behind us and I heard the girl say, “Oh, dear.” I turned and saw she had dropped a glass and broken it. I supposed they didn’t have any courses on the handling of champagne glasses at Sarah Lawrence.
“Do not grieve, dearest
,” Fabian said as he helped pick up the pieces. “It’s a lucky omen. In fact, I’m glad you did it. It reminds me we have a cold bottle of wine in the fridge.”
The girl smiled gratefully at Fabian. In the three weeks she had been working for us, he had won her over completely. When I spoke to her, she seemed to be trying to catch a weak message being tapped through a thick wall.
Fabian went back into the little room we had partitioned off as an office and brought out the bottle of champagne. He had insisted upon having the refrigerator put in as an essential piece of the gallery’s furniture. “It will pay its keep in the first week,” he had said as he told the workmen where to install it.
I watched him expertly tear off the foil and unwind the wire. “Miles,” I said, “I just had breakfast.”
“What better time, old man.” The cork popped out. “This is a great day. We must treat it with the utmost care.” His life, I had discovered, was replete with great days.
He poured the champagne for the girl and myself. He raised his glass. “To Angelo Quinn,” he said. “And to us.”
We drank. I thought of all the champagne I had drunk since I had met Miles Fabian and shook my head.
“Oh, by the way, Douglas,” he said, as he filled his glass again, “I nearly forgot. Another of our investments will be represented here tonight.”
“What investment?”
“At the party last night, we had a distinguished guest.” He chuckled reminiscently. “Priscilla Dean.”
“Oh, my God,” I said. A good part of the abuse heaped on our movie had been directed at the feminine lead. Her photograph, in the nude and in the most provocative positions, had appeared in two nationally circulated magazines. Crowds followed her in the streets. She had been booed by a section of the studio audience when she appeared on television. It had added to the receipts of the movie, but I was doubtful of what it would do for Quinn’s reputation. “Don’t tell me,” I said, “that you invited her here tonight.”