The Collector's Apprentice

by B. A. Shapiro

  “Please, Alexandre, please let me explain. It’s not what you—”

  “My brother is dead because of . . . because of . . .” He chokes on the words, and his face reddens. “Your father, a supposed friend, persuaded him to invest, and he lost everything. Joseph could not bear the embarrassment, the failure. He . . . he left his wife a widow and three little boys . . . without a centime.”

  Paulien jumps from her chair and takes a step toward him. “Oh no. No. I’m so sorry. So very sorry. That’s—”

  Alexandre holds up his hands, and she stops. “You need to leave.” His voice is raspy; he’s close to tears. “And if you are smart, you will also get out of that hotel. Out of Paris. This city is smaller than it seems.”

  “But you don’t understand. It’s all a mistake. My father didn’t know anything. And . . . and there wasn’t anything to know. It will all be cleared up as soon as George finds—”

  “Do not tell me your father just wanted to help Joseph make a few francs. No, your father was getting a cut of the profits, of this there can be no doubt. And you, engaged to marry that . . . that bandit!” Alexandre barks a laugh containing no humor, and his eyes are black with derision. “Obviously your fiancé is well off.”

  “But he didn’t. Papa didn’t. And George didn’t either. A Swiss banker stole all the money and George is going—”

  “Get out of my sight!”

  Paulien rushes for the door. She moves quickly away from the gallery, turns at the first corner, slithers into an alley, and pushes herself into a small notch between two buildings. Merde. No one has ever looked at her like that. With such disdain and contempt. Such scorn. She closes her eyes against the shame, but it doesn’t go away.

  When she composes herself, she hurries to the telegraph office. i must come home, papa. stop. please come get me. stop. now. Then she returns to Le Meurice to wait for him.

  She holes up in her hotel room, afraid of being seen, eating little, sleeping as much as she can. As the days pass and neither her father nor George appears, it begins to dawn on her that they might not. That she may be on her own. Surely it’s just that it’s taking George a long time to find the banker, but she’s troubled that she’s the only one who believes there’s one to be found. And where is Papa? She writes a letter every day, sometimes more than one, but there is no response. She burrows deeper into the covers and sobs like a child.

  But she isn’t a child. She’s an adult, almost twenty years old. When her tears run dry, Paulien drags herself from the bed. Although she wishes she were dead, she also wishes to live. She counts her money. Once she pays the hotel bill, she will have almost nothing left. What will she do? How she will survive? She has no answers, but there is no doubt that she must pawn her ring and move to cheaper lodgings.

  For the first time in days, she leaves the hotel and heads into districts she’s never seen before. Her family spent many holidays in Paris, but none in these quarters of serpentine lanes and wooden buildings pressed tight to their neighbors. The women on the streets are pale and thin and look exhausted. They wear dresses of rough cotton, often covered by aprons; the dresses and aprons look as if they haven’t been washed any more often than their owners. The men look even more downtrodden in their frayed pants and hats stained with sweat.

  What must it be like to live in such poverty? To have so little and perhaps even less hope for the future? It occurs to her that this might be her own state, but despite the silence from home and George, she can’t believe this is true. Still, she must proceed as if it is.

  After visits to three pawnbrokers, she returns to the one who offered the most money. The shop is cramped and smells like the inside of an old suitcase. The proprietor leers at her as she pulls the ring over her knuckle. She’s not going to cry in front of him, she’s not, she won’t. But it feels as if she’s drowning. She imagines George returning to the shop to retrieve the ring, putting it back on her finger where it belongs. This calms her enough to take the money the man proffers, a fraction of what the ring is worth, one hundred francs. Which won’t last long.

  She has to locate a room she can afford, somewhere safe where she can stay until things work themselves out. She can’t go home without an invitation, not after how quickly they assumed the worst of her, of George. How could they possibly believe she would swindle them? Her own family? Nor does she have enough money to leave Paris for another destination. She wanders the streets, wonders if she is walking in circles, finds nothing.

  Finally she comes upon a sign for a women’s rooming house on rue du Cardinal Lemoine. The arrow points to a door covered with chipped blue paint that’s squeezed between a butcher and a dank shop that appears to sell gear for horses. She climbs a flight of stairs to another door in no better shape than the first.

  Standing on the rickety landing, she tells herself that this, too, is a momentary obstacle. A tale she and George will laughingly tell their children someday: how Papa fooled Maman with one of his silly pranks and how well she survived on her own. George is such a jokester. Like the way he proposed marriage, allowing her to think one thing while he was busy planning another. She knocks.

  A slender girl, stringy hair held tight to her forehead by sweat, answers and eyes her uneasily. “You lost?”

  “I’m looking for a room.”

  The girl laughs, revealing a broken front tooth. “Not here.”

  “There’s nothing available?”

  “Not for you.”

  “But you do have a vacancy?”

  “Va-can-cy,” she mimics, looking Paulien up and down, taking quite an interest in her shoes. “What we got is a room in the attic. Not near swanky enough for you.”

  “Can I see it, please?”

  “Hot in summer,” the girl continues. “Freezing in winter. Cold water down one floor and a WC more like a closet with a slop bucket than anything else.”

  “How much?”

  The girl narrows her eyes. “One franc a week.” She tries to keep a sly smile from her lips and almost succeeds.

  Paulien considers bargaining, as this is surely higher than the usual rate, but she says, “I’ll take it.”

  “You got a name?”

  A name. Paulien hesitates. She needs a new name. One that will hide who she is, a nationality that isn’t hers. An English surname. A French given name. “Vivienne,” she says, appropriating this from her favorite nanny. “Gregsby,” she adds, appropriating this from a professor she admired at the Slade. “I’m Vivienne Gregsby.”

  “Well then, Vivienne Gregsby, give me enough to cover two weeks and it is yours.”

  Paulien guesses she’s being taken again, that few of the women seeking shelter here have the means to pay so much in advance. She’s aware she can’t afford to be generous any longer, that the girl probably has more money than she does, but she hands her a franc. “I’ll give you the other half tomorrow,” she says, deciding against seeing the room, fearful she’ll lose her nerve. “I’ll be back in the morning.”

  Before she returns to Le Meurice for her last evening as Paulien Mertens, she sends her parents a telegram with her new name and address. Then she stops at a hairdresser and has a coiffeur bob her long blond hair and dye it dark brown. A completely different person gazes back at her from the mirror. She supposes it’s Vivienne Gregsby.

  2

  Vivienne, 1922

  Vivienne’s room is tiny, just enough space for a narrow cot and two wooden boxes to hold her meager belongings. The sounds of squabbling between the two sisters who run the place and the screeching of chickens in the coops just below her window never seem to let up, and neither do the odors of raw meat and horses and leather. She can’t return to her more familiar haunts, fearful of seeing Alexandre’s loathing and pain on another face, so she spends her days roaming the streets of her new neighborhood, chain-smoking and trying to remain invisible.

  She eats little, her stomach now shrunk to the size of a clenched fist, knotted like an old woman’s fingers, and s
he’s dropped at least ten pounds since coming to Paris. She’s always been on the plump side, so this alters her appearance more than she would have thought. It also saves money. But not enough. She has eighty-six francs and must find a job.

  Not an unpaid position, as she had in London, but one with a salary large enough to support her and allow her to save money to leave France. She’s never thought much about a salaried position, or making money, for that matter. Her father’s lessons in how to curate the Mertens collection never included the financial aspects, as she was raised to believe it was vulgar for a girl to consider such things. But now she finds herself without income or connections, disowned and disavowed, on her own in a world she doesn’t understand, her lessons in piano, art, and elocution having prepared her for nothing.

  Dark clouds shadow her wanderings. Papa, Maman, Léon, Franck, do they miss her? They know where she is, her new name, how to find her, but still no one has come. Do they think about her? Do they still love her? She would never have believed the answer to these questions could be no. She aches for them all. For George.

  She yearns almost as much for the world of art. Her father is the fourth-generation owner of Mertens Mills and Textiles, the largest producer of cotton in Belgium, and he’s also an art collector. She’s dreamed of becoming a skilled collector since she was a girl, preparing to take over the family collection, which was started by Arrière-grand-père Mertens, ignored by her grandfather, and enhanced by her father. But her aspirations go far beyond simple stewardship. She’s going to convert a large barn on the eastern end of their estate and create the Mertens Museum of Post-Impressionism, the greatest post-Impressionist art center in the world.

  The majority of the Mertens collection, the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century European paintings purchased by her great-grandfather, is located in the formal north wing of their manor house and is open to the public five days a week. But the pieces she and Papa like best—the paintings he acquired over the past few decades against the advice of his friends, all of whom believed the works to be inferior and the artists mad—hang together in a room in the east wing, which they refer to as the colonnade because it opens into a hallway framed by two sets of Corinthian columns. Three by Henri Matisse, The Music Lesson, Dishes and Melon, and Still Life with Gourds; two by Pablo Picasso, Head of a Woman and Young Woman Holding a Cigarette; Seurat’s A Sunday on La Grande Jatte; and Cézanne’s Five Bathers.

  Originally, these seven paintings were in the north wing with the more traditional works, but closed-minded patrons complained that they weren’t art, only smudges by untalented pretenders, and Papa removed them to the colonnade. Growing up, she spent as much time there as she could, sneaking away from her nannies and tutors to be with the pictures.

  The room was furnished with a few comfortable couches and chairs, and her preferred spot was directly across from Matisse’s The Music Lesson, her favorite of the seven. She would curl up on the silver-blue sofa with her sketchbook and pencils, sometimes drawing and sometimes just looking, drifting, dreaming, allowing the paintings to transport her into a distant world.

  Aside from the staff, she didn’t have much company as a young girl. The family property expanded for miles in every direction, and her mother insisted she be educated at home by the same tiresome teachers who had taught her and her sisters eons before. Paulien’s older brother, Léon, was too straitlaced to be any fun, and although she was crazy for her younger brother, Franck, he was too little to be much of a playmate.

  Her mother, whose interests lay in gossip, parties, expensive jewelry, and being a beauty, was unhappy that her only daughter wasn’t concerned with any of these things. Maman often predicted that, despite her pretty face, if Paulien didn’t start acting more like a proper girl, she would be forced to “marry down,” the worst fate imaginable. The paintings, on the other hand, were always there, welcoming her, opening up to her so she could crawl into their swirling emotions and bring them to life with her imaginings. Bring herself to life.

  One day when she was about eleven, her father came upon her softly weeping in front of The Music Lesson. Embarrassed and afraid he’d think poorly of her, she jumped up and wiped her tears with the sleeve of her dress. “Hello, Papa.”

  “Why are you crying, my dear?” he asked.

  She didn’t know how to explain what she was feeling, but he hardly ever asked her a personal question, and she wanted to answer him. For him to take notice of her. She pointed to the picture. “I, ah, I always feel sad that the people are so alone. They are a family just like us—a sister and two brothers, but there is no father in the picture, and the mother is so far away. As if she does not care what her children are doing. And maybe the father does not either.”

  He gave her an intense look she couldn’t read. “What makes you think they are alone? They are home together enjoying their amusements.”

  “I . . . I do not know,” she stuttered. When he glanced at his watch, she blurted out, “Maybe it is because they are not looking at one another. The older brother is reading his book, the mother is knitting behind the house, and even though the small boy and the sister sit together at the piano, there’s . . . there’s something that seems to keep them apart. I do not ever want our family to be like that.”

  “Very good.” Papa pointed to a wide band of gold—ostensibly the edge of a gilded frame—that cut between the heads of the two piano players, separating them. “Very good, Paulie.” He glanced at her, at the painting, back at her. “You are an insightful girl. Not like your brothers, who cannot be bothered to sit still long enough to look at anything.”

  This comment astounded her. The times her father was at home instead of at his offices, he gave most of his attention to her brothers, once in a while glancing at her indulgently but dismissively. Just the night before, at dinner, he’d grilled Léon about his lessons in physics, threw out mathematics problems to Franck, but told her she needed to smile more if she was ever going to find a man to marry her. Her mother heartily agreed.

  Delighted that for once she’d bested her brothers, Paulien cried, “This room is my favorite place in the whole wide world, Papa!”

  He leaned over and kissed the top of her head. “I am glad it is here for you whenever you wish.”

  After that, he began to discuss the paintings with her, as well as his thoughts on how creativity was shaped and changed, on the future of art. Paulien reveled in his attention, the best hours of her days. One afternoon he pulled a chair close to where she was seated on the couch. “How would you like it if someday this was yours—the whole collection?”

  “Mine?” She was the daughter, and although she knew she would always be taken care of, would want for nothing, she’d always assumed the properties would go to her brothers. “Léon and Franck—”

  “Léon and Franck will have nothing to complain about. They have no feeling for art. And the collection deserves to be grown and nurtured by someone who does.”

  “I can do that,” she told him. “I’ll take good care of them. All of them. Even Arrière-grand-père’s dark ones. And I’ll find more to keep our special seven company—to keep me company.”

  For the next five years he trained her, changing the tenor of their relationship, sharing his devotion to art, deepening her own and their respect for each other. A businessman with an obsession for order, he claimed that this school of art, which was being called post-Impressionism, provided a respite for him, a means to step outside his restrained world. Paulien, on the other hand, a girl who flaunted rules and had a passion for the uneven and irregular, was drawn by the playful defying of traditional perspective and the artists’ use of raw, expressive color.

  Papa taught her not only about art but also about the art of collecting. About choosing always what she loved, but only those pieces that fit into her vision, works that would make the whole greater than its parts. He took her to museums and galleries and auctions. He explained that a true collector was unconcerned with what he acquir
ed for himself or his family in the present; he was concerned only with what he acquired for posterity. A collector was a curator, a custodian, for art could not be owned in the sense a piece of furniture could be owned; it was timeless and meant to be shared.

  Now all those teachings might be for naught, the Mertens family a reflection of the Matisse family in The Music Lesson: separated, disconnected, shattered. Just as she had told her father she never wanted them to be.

  Vivienne craves a walk through the galleries and museums she once took for granted, visits to artists’ studios, to discuss what’s new, what’s good and what isn’t, to think about what would best fit her vision. She sees the barn transformed into an open and airy museum, white walls covered with bold hues and stylized abstractions. The tears fall.

  She wallows in self-pity for a few weeks, spending money she can’t afford on cigarettes and telegrams to Brussels that go unanswered. One afternoon she’s so disheartened that she splurges on a half-dozen éclairs. She sits at a table outside the boulangerie and gobbles down three in quick succession. Then she throws it all up in a trash can. The stench of vomit combined with rancid rubbish is overwhelming, and she rushes to the street, gasping for fresh air.

  She watches a woman with two little girls, each clutching one of her hands, as they come around the corner. Their clothes are well worn and the children’s dresses are smudged with coal, but they’re all singing “Frère Jacques,” the girls’ high voices appealingly off-key. When the verse ends, the woman stoops to drop a kiss onto the top of each child’s head. The girls laugh and look up at her adoringly.

  As the three of them reach the front of the épicerie, a rough-looking man with a scraggily beard whips off his hat, bows, and chivalrously opens the door for them. The woman smiles, curtsies, and enters the shop. The girls’ giggles tinkle along with the bell on the door.