The Collector's Apprentice

by B. A. Shapiro

  “And I have one for you. May I go first?”

  “Of course,” she says, wishing it were otherwise.

  “What would you think about a permanent position?”

  “A permanent position,” she repeats. Did he mean here or in the States?

  “I need a secretary,” he explains. “But more than a secretary, an assistant. Someone smart with an eye for art, someone to help me get my museum off the ground. I’m also going to start a school. To teach people how to appreciate art. I’ll need someone to help me plan and run that, too.”

  “In America?”

  “The salary is good,” he says quickly, as if her question meant she was opposed to the idea. “Very good. I’ll pay for your travel and anything else that you might need to get settled.”

  The Trial, 1928

  Edwin, it would astound you how much a judge’s facial expressions can change the tenor of a courtroom—as well as, I fear, the minds of the jurors. Everyone knows the legal system is corrupt, but this has to border on judicial misconduct.

  The judge smiles at the district attorney and frowns at my lawyer. He cocks his head and listens attentively to Pratt but rolls his eyes and stares upward when Ronald makes a request or offers an objection. He often glares down at me like a malevolent Old Testament god disappointed by the behavior of one of his minions.

  And I don’t believe for a moment that the fact that I’m sitting before this particular judge is a coincidence. It’s the work of Thomas Quinton, whose motivations for wanting me convicted are as clear as they are chilling. And whose power in this city is the most disturbing of all. Just as he and Ada are certainly the masterminds behind the entire charade, from my arrest to this trial.

  “I’m going to prove you killed my Edwin,” Ada railed at me during your funeral. “Just sit back and watch me!” When Quinton tried to silence her, she turned on him and screamed, “Don’t shush me—you promised to help me prove it!” Need I say more?

  Perhaps Quinton is the one who hired the truck driver. What could be more perfect? He sets me up for your murder, finagles my conviction, and then gets your collection for his museum and your wife for his bed. I’m sorry to be crass, but you have to admit those are the two things he’s been fighting for all these years.

  First up today was Jacob Gusdorff. Pratt took him through the usual set-up questions: his extensive credentials, how many wills he had prepared in his career, how long he had been your personal attorney, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Then Pratt asked him to read specific parts of the will to the court, particularly those sections pertaining to “Miss Gregsby’s complete control of the assets, including use and divestment.”

  When Jacob finished reading, Pratt asked, “Do you know if this was still Dr. Bradley’s intention at the time of his death?”

  “It was not.” Jacob glared at me.

  “It wasn’t?” Pratt’s face was awash with false incredulity. “Could you please clarify?”

  Jacob checked his notes. “On Thursday, January twelfth, 1928, I received a call from Dr. Bradley directing me to draw up a new will. He instructed me to remove Miss Gregsby as the beneficiary and appoint his wife, Ada Leggett Bradley, as his legal heir. We had an appointment on the following Monday, January sixteenth, for him to sign the new documents.”

  “And did that meeting occur?”

  “Unfortunately, no. Dr. Bradley died on Sunday, January fifteenth.”

  “So, correct me if I’m wrong, but because the new will was never signed, Miss Gregsby remains the beneficiary even though that was not Dr. Bradley’s intent?”

  “That is correct.”

  “And if Dr. Bradley had not been killed during those short few days between your telephone conversation and your meeting, who would be the beneficiary of his estate?”

  Again the glower in my direction. “His wife, Mrs. Bradley, who is currently his contingent beneficiary.”

  It all sounded so harsh. Ronald promises me that this means nothing without evidence of opportunity. Both are needed in murder-for-hire cases, which he claims are notoriously tough to prove. Why doesn’t this give me more confidence?

  8

  Vivienne, 1923

  Vivienne tells Dr. Bradley she’s seasick and stays in her cabin for the entire crossing. The steward brings her tea and biscuits but little else. This is fine, as she has no appetite and wants to stay as far away from the other passengers as possible. Although she will soon be reunited with her cherished paintings and is putting thousands of miles between herself and her mistakes, she struggles to work up enthusiasm for the new life ahead. This is what she wanted, what she prayed for, but to be exiled to America, on her own in that vast land, is far from what she ever envisioned for herself.

  She curls herself into a ball, hollow and aching for loving arms to hold her. But there’s only the ocean to rock her to sleep. She’s as untethered as the waves outside her tiny porthole, adrift, severed from her family and friends, from who she is. Or more correctly, from who she was.

  Because of George, a depraved man without a whiff of empathy, who purposely shattered countless lives for his own greed and self-aggrandizement. A man so narcissistic that he assumed she had recognized and accepted his scheming, that she would come with him when he called.

  It’s going to be a long time before she’s able to trust a man again. If ever. Or trust herself. She fell so hard for George’s lies, believing them because she wanted them to be true. Wanted him. But he didn’t want her. Had never wanted her. He managed her like a puppeteer manipulates his dummy. Which is exactly what she was, never suspecting anything was amiss.

  But he was also her first love, her only love, and God help her, sometimes she finds herself yearning for him, for the life they imagined together. For the light touch of his lips as they grazed the inside of her wrist, for his breath in her ear, for those sweet, sweet nights. She presses her limbs even more tightly together in an attempt to take up as little space as possible.

  She will get justice for herself and her father and everyone else George swindled. He will be punished, forced to his knees. He’ll come looking for her again—that night in Paris he all but promised he would. And when he does, she’ll encourage him, scam him right back, edge him out into the open and make sure he’s locked up for the rest of his life. Her contribution to George’s demise will finally exonerate her in her father’s eyes. Even if she will never be exonerated in her own.

  She visualizes George being led into a grim-looking prison, handcuffed and shackled, one burly guard hovering close at his right and another at his left. He’s pale and haggard, a crushed man, and he stares at the sidewalk as he shuffles along. He will be staying in the boxy brick building topped with turrets and barbed wire for the rest of his life. And she’s the one who put him there. A bevy of flashbulbs pop as a policeman shakes her hand.

  A few days before they left France, she told Dr. Bradley that she’d lost her passport, and he miraculously handed her a new one the next day. So now, as she disembarks in New York City, she’s Vivienne Gregsby, permanently, irrevocably, her fictive name now official. It’s an odd feeling, to be herself and yet not to be herself, to stand essentially naked, unformed.

  If Dr. Bradley is startled by the small size of her suitcase or how quickly she was able to divest herself of a life, he doesn’t mention it. He and his wife, Ada, live in Merion, Pennsylvania, a suburb of Philadelphia, where the Bradley Museum is nearing completion. The couple presently resides in a rented house on the other side of town, but they will soon move into their new home, which is attached to the museum. Vivienne feels sorry for Ada Bradley, a delicate slip of a woman, pretty in an old-fashioned way, of whom Dr. Bradley clearly thinks little. He barely speaks to her, barely acknowledges her presence.

  With Dr. Bradley’s generous moving provision, Vivienne takes two rooms in a widow’s house a block from the new museum. Even with the large number of francs she left under Adélaïde, Rachelle, and Odette’s pillows, she’s feeling flush.
She saved in Paris, and her new salary is high. For the first time since leaving Brussels, she’s not afraid of running out of money. Although she’s never been to America before, which is unfamiliar and daunting, she’s far away from Paulien Mertens, and this makes her feel safe. If unsteady.

  Dr. Bradley brings her to the construction site her first day on the job. It’s mid-January, well below freezing, and a sharp wind whips around her. It’s much worse than anything she’s experienced in Brussels or Paris, even London. He offers her his coat, which she takes; it’s too big and she keeps tripping over the hem. She heard it was cold in America but never imagined it would be this bitter. She needs a warmer coat. Wool gloves, definitely wool gloves. More socks.

  The exterior of the building is complete, a classical Beaux-Arts structure of creamy limestone, which surprises her, as she expected it to be more modern. They walk up two planks of wood, through what will soon be the front door, and into the main gallery, which is crawling with carpenters and plasterers and painters and every other conceivable kind of workman. But the walls are up and the windows installed, so it’s easy to see what it will become, which is breathtaking.

  Vivienne gazes up at the towering ceiling, at the open railing of the second floor, at the arches that crown the three two-story mullioned windows, at the wide doorways leading into rooms to the left, to the right, and straight ahead. “It’s so open,” she says. “So light. So big.”

  “That’s why I need all that art.”

  From the size of the outside of the building, it’s clear there are at least two dozen more galleries. “It’s going to take you forever.”

  “A lifelong project,” Dr. Bradley agrees. “Especially because I’m going to hang the pictures in groupings. Many groupings. Eight, ten, perhaps twenty paintings on a single wall, four walls in every gallery. I also have a large collection of metalwork—keys, hinges, padlocks, escutcheons, ladles, scissors—which I’m going to intersperse around and between the paintings.”

  She thinks of Gertrude Stein’s salon and winces at the idea of her paintings being one among many. Each deserves its own wall, its own space with room to breathe. Hinges and scissors?

  “Mine will be completely different from Gertrude’s compositions,” he explains as if reading her mind. “They won’t be haphazard and lackadaisical—they’ll be symmetrical and purposeful. I’m going to position the artworks in a different way. A new way. Not so much by century or school or artist, but by color and light and subject matter. Juxtapositions that show off the similarities and differences between them.”

  In every museum Vivienne has visited, the paintings are hung according to their chronologies: Greek and Roman in one gallery, Medieval in another, Renaissance and Baroque in the next. It was the same at the estate. She’s in awe of Dr. Bradley’s daring, if skeptical of its effect. It’s almost as if he’s an artist rather than a curator, developing new approaches to self-expression.

  He shows her the rest of the building. There are twenty-three galleries, thirteen on the first floor, ten on the second, one flowing into another in a ring of rectangles. It’s going to be a truly marvelous museum. If she has to be in exile, this isn’t a bad place to be banished.

  The next day, she accompanies him to his factory. She had no idea he owned a factory. But this is how he made, and is still making, his money. He explains that he grew up in a part of South Philadelphia called The Neck, one of the toughest neighborhoods in an area of tough neighborhoods. His father was often out of work, and the family was well acquainted with poverty and hunger. But Dr. Bradley went to Central High—the examination school of choice for the clever poor—did well, entered Penn, and received his MD when he was twenty. But that isn’t how he got rich.

  He quickly abandoned medicine for chemistry, then realized what he really wanted was to be a businessman. Along with another chemist, Ben Hagerty, he developed the formula for a drug they named Argyrol, which when put into the eyes of newborns protected them from blindness. Soon hospitals all over the world were using it, and Edwin Bradley was a multimillionaire.

  For a number of years, he put all his energies into running Bradley and Hagerty, Chemists, the company and factory that produces Argyrol. But soon that, too, lost its luster, and as his interest in his business waned, he tried his hand at painting. When this was less successful than he had hoped, he turned his attention to collecting and curating. He still spends most of the week at the factory, because it is, after all, the way he supports his obsession. Although once the Bradley Museum is open, he claims he plans to split his time between the two.

  “Remember I told you that in addition to a museum, I’m going to create a school?” he asks as he leads Vivienne past rows of workers at long benches. He points toward a room that appears to be a classroom, half a dozen rows of chairs facing a podium. “To teach people how to appreciate art. Not to tell them what to think about a piece, but to give them the tools to decide for themselves.”

  “Yes,” she says, although she doesn’t remember any such thing. She’s finding that her memory is fuzzy about much that happened between July and December of the previous year. A blessing, she supposes.

  They enter the room, where a painting by Modigliani sits on an easel to the left of the podium, and one by Rousseau sits on the right. The Modigliani is a picture of a redhead in a polka-dot blouse, flat and foreshortened but potent, taking up most of the canvas. The Rousseau is also of a lone woman, but she’s tiny, dwarfed by fantastical trees and plants.

  Each painting is striking in its own way, but seeing the two next to each other makes them even more so: one woman calm and comfortable, the other clearly out of her element; the colors of one tranquil and muted, the other rich and lush; the focus of one on the human, the other on the natural.

  Vivienne never thought to look this way before, seeing what one artist included and what another left out, highlighting the choices taken and raising questions about why and why not. She’s astonished by the insight, and she wishes more than anything that she could discuss this with her father. Maybe Dr. Bradley’s curatorial ideas have more merit than she appreciated.

  “The contrast between the two is so persuasive,” she says. “Amazing to see them together like this.”

  “These two paintings are instructive,” Dr. Bradley tells her. “Modigliani’s painting style is freer.” He points to a spot where the canvas shows through. “The opposite of Rousseau’s tight control of the outline of every leaf.”

  “So you’ve begun already?” she asks. “Your school. The students are coming here until the museum building is finished? Then you’ll move them over there?”

  “I’ve started the classes, but no, the students aren’t going to switch to the museum.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “I’ve been holding classes for my employees.”

  “The factory workers?” Most of the workers she’s seen are Negroes, and she would guess none of them—including the white ones—have much education. “You’re teaching them about art?”

  “Twice a week for two hours. For two years now.”

  “They stay after work?”

  “The classes are held during the workday,” he tells her, as if there’s nothing unusual about the arrangement. “I bring in new pictures and close the plant down. Everyone comes in here and we discuss what we see.”

  “You pay them?”

  “Same as if they were on the floor.”

  She watches as the workers file into the classroom. “Another Modigliani,” a tall Negro man says as he sits down. “I like how she’s looking right at me.”

  Vivienne is settled into her temporary office, a bedroom in the Bradley’s rented house. It’s across from Dr. Bradley’s office, another bedroom. When the museum is completed, the staff will be relocated there, and the Bradleys will take possession of their new home. She’s handed piles of papers and files and letters and receipts and order forms. It’s her job to file them, organize them, answer them, follow up on t
hem, and then start boxing them up for the move.

  At first she’s overwhelmed, but she’s naturally organized and takes to the tasks better than she would have thought, although her typing skills lag. Fortunately, Dr. Bradley is more concerned with the details of getting his museum off the ground than with her typing errors. He’s also arranging to exhibit a number of his paintings at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, and the academy show is the first time she gets to work as his assistant rather than as his secretary. She helps him to choose the paintings, to write the introductory essay, to hang the artwork.

  Dr. Bradley is convinced the upcoming show will open conservative Philadelphia’s eyes to the future of art. He acknowledges that a decade earlier, some of Manet’s and Van Gogh’s later paintings were included in an exhibition, and a well-known Philadelphia psychiatrist derided them as degenerate. The doctor claimed the men who created them were insane, and the art establishment agreed. But Dr. Bradley insists times have changed. Europe began to shift after the 1918 Paris show. Why not the United States?

  When she cautiously points out that the pictures in the new show are even more radical—not only Impressionist but post-Impressionist, not only Cubist but Abstract—he dismisses her concerns. “The cultural icons of Philadelphia jeered at the first performance of Schoenberg’s Kammersymphonie, and five years later the audience gave the same work a standing ovation. All they need is education. They did it for Schoenberg, and they’ll do it for Matisse.”

  The evening of the opening is rainy, cold for April. The piano softly plays “By the Light of the Silvery Moon,” as hors d’oeuvres are passed throughout the soaring gallery and the guests absorb the even more soaring paintings. There are several Picassos and Modiglianis, a couple of Cézannes and Soutines, a Mondrian, a Klee, as well as Matisse’s The Joy of Life.