The Collector's Apprentice

by B. A. Shapiro

  As the train to Philadelphia sways and the backsides of narrow tenements rush by, she congratulates herself on the deftness of her plan. Now Edwin just needs to care enough to make it work.

  When she arrives home and sees Edwin’s car parked in front of the widow’s house, it’s all she can do to keep a grin of triumph off her face. But Edwin isn’t in it, just his chauffeur, who hands her an envelope with her name on it and drives away. Inside is a note, short and direct: “Now that you have returned, I will visit tomorrow.”

  No signature. No request. No stipulated time. Just a statement of his intention. But his autocratic stunt will come to nothing. The grin she’s been holding back bursts through.

  She spends three days at the Philadelphia library studying art books and enjoys herself. If this doesn’t work, perhaps she will actually go to graduate school. She won’t have Papa’s paintings and she won’t be able to open the Bradley collection to the public, yet it could be a life. A good life. But she’s not giving up so easily. It’s time to stay home and have a little chat with Edwin Bradley.

  At eleven o’clock the next morning, Vivienne hears the bell chime, followed by two sets of feet on the stairs. There’s a knock on her door, and when she opens it, the widow and Edwin are standing in the hallway.

  Her landlady frowns—male callers are not allowed—but Edwin is wearing a finely tailored suit, holds a new bowler hat in his hands, and is obviously much older than Vivienne. The widow is apprehensive about leaving the two of them alone, but Vivienne assures her that Edwin is her boss or, more correctly, was her boss.

  The woman hesitates. “If you say so,” she states in a way that clearly indicates she doesn’t believe it. Then she heads down the stairs after giving Edwin a hard look of warning and telling Vivienne to leave the door ajar.

  “Hello, Vivienne,” Edwin says stiffly once they’re alone.

  “Edwin.” She holds the door open for him to enter, but only a sliver.

  He has to twist sideways in order to slide through the narrow opening. Once inside, he glances toward the small couch. When she doesn’t offer him a seat, he stands, shifting from one foot to the other.

  Vivienne doesn’t say a word.

  “How have you been?” he finally asks.

  “I’ve been quite well, Edwin. And you?”

  “May I sit down?”

  It must have killed him to ask, so she takes pity. “Please,” she says in the most distantly polite voice she can conjure. He sits on the couch, and she perches on the lone chair at the tiny table. He looks like a boy who’s been sent by his mother to apologize for some misbehavior. And she intends to make him squirm until he does.

  “What happened the other day . . .”

  She purses her lips.

  “I was hasty.”

  “Hasty?” she repeats. He’s going to have to do better than that.

  “That’s the wrong word. What I mean is that I shouldn’t have reprimanded you in front of the class.”

  “What you shouldn’t have done is reprimanded me at all. I’m not a child whose knuckles you get to smack with a ruler. I’m a teacher. Presumably your colleague. And I won’t be treated as anything less.”

  “You are a colleague,” he concedes.

  Vivienne doesn’t respond. Is this supposed to pass as an apology? If she’s to get the upper hand, he has to come out and say it.

  “I want you to come back to the Bradley.”

  “I’m not coming back.”

  “Hear me out.”

  She shakes her head emphatically. “I can’t work with you. I can’t work under the constant threat of your anger. Being afraid I’ll say something you don’t like and then be subjected to your rage. To your humiliation.”

  “I never meant to humiliate you.”

  “Well, you did.”

  “It won’t happen again.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “The Bradley needs you.”

  “I’ve applied to go to graduate school in the spring. Art history. At New York University. I’ve already met with the admissions department, and they’re certain I’ll be accepted. I rented an apartment in New York,” she lies. “Waverly Place. I’m moving at the end of the month.”

  “You can’t mean that.”

  “You are who you are,” she says. “And I am who I am. I’m always going to want to go my own way, think my own way, and you’re always going to hate it when I disagree with you—and then get angry at me for it.”

  “That’s not true.”

  Vivienne wonders how long she should protest. Hours? Days? Months? Or should she grab what he’s proposing before he changes his mind? George would hold strong. “I’m sorry, Edwin, but it’s just not going to work.”

  He runs the rim of his hat through his fingers, but he doesn’t argue, and she goes cold. She’s pushed too far. Edwin is too smart for George’s tricks. He isn’t going to fall for wanting what he can’t have. He’ll just go out and find someone else.

  Then he says, “But it can. Your ideas are good, very good, and I believe that if we work together as a team, we can help each other come up with even better ones.”

  “So you want me to stick around so I can help you come up with better ideas?” His sort-of apology is as lame as it is self-centered. Clearly he just can’t help himself.

  “We’ll be two parts that create a bigger and better whole,” he offers. “Create what neither one of us would be able to do on our own. You’ll be more than my assistant—you’ll be my apprentice. And then who knows? We’ll design curricula, travel to Europe to buy artwork. Together we’ll mold the Bradley, build the school, the collection. Make it everything it can be.”

  She hesitates, knowing George would string him along for longer, wrestle for more. But she got her concessions, and from Edwin’s obvious fear of losing her, it seems as if there might be more in the future. She isn’t George. She has neither his patience nor his steel nerves. And she wants this too much. “No yelling,” she finally says.

  Edwin smiles. “No yelling.”

  It appears George is good for something after all.

  13

  George/Benjamin, 1923

  This time it’s a wealthy widow. Granted, she isn’t as lithe and spontaneous as Paulien Mertens, but Katherine Clarendon handles middle age better than most, and she’s proving to be an even more valuable channel to cash than Paulien was.

  Katherine knows everyone in New York City with real money, and because both her own and her late husband’s family have been blue blood since before the dawn of time, her connections stretch wide and deep, across generations and geographies. She has friends and relatives in Philadelphia, Boston, Miami, Chicago, and Beverly Hills—and they’re all very, very rich. A veritable gold mine, the old girl is.

  Katherine thinks he’s only nine years her junior, as Paulien thought he was only seven years her senior. In truth he’s thirty-five, fourteen years older than Paulien and fifteen younger than Katherine. These side games amuse him. People will believe anything you tell them, as long as it’s what they want to believe. Especially women. They see what they want to see, what you guide them to see—and overlook what you guide them to overlook.

  As always, this new project is protracted and tedious, but it’s his business and he does it well. He imagines himself as a theater actor, playing essentially the same role in the same play every evening, whether he’s Harold Berkeley or George Everard or Benjamin Talcott, whether he’s in Toronto or London or New York. Every day and every night he delivers the best performance possible: he’s witty and smart, charming and self-effacing. No one has an inkling of how much he hates them.

  He’s operating this business as he always does. Planning, patience, and an appreciation for the underpinnings of human greed do it every time. Not a single investor who came to him through Katherine has made a withdrawal. That’s how much they trust him—and how truly moneyed they are. And although she’s no randy young girl like Paulien, Katherine is better
in bed than he expected. Another bonus.

  Katherine runs with the art crowd, which makes his present game even more tiresome than usual. Although he actually does like art, all those gallery openings and museum fund-raisers and self-centered artists and even more self-centered collectors drive him up the wall. She was raised in Philadelphia, where most of her family still lives, and is a major patron of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. This means endless trips to the City of Brotherly Love, which he doesn’t love at all.

  Everyone there has New York envy and acts even snootier and more pretentious than the snooty and pretentious well-to-do inhabitants of the other cities he’s visited. On the other hand, it’s where Paulien lives. She has a hold on him none of his other marks ever had, which both displeases and intrigues him. He’s seen her and Bradley around town, and he plans to see more of her. Much more.

  Despite her protests in Paris, she must, at least at times, think of him tenderly. She thinks of their lovemaking tenderly, of that he has no doubt.

  14

  Paulien, 1920

  Paulien brought George home for Christmas. On the train to Brussels they had a first-class compartment to themselves, and she told him about her family: her lovely but social-climbing mother; her driven father with a soft spot for art; her pompous older brother; and little Franck, now in public school and all grown up at fifteen. She also told him about the money.

  He was amused. “Why all the secrecy? Did you think I wouldn’t be interested in you if I knew you were of the landed gentry?”

  It did sound foolish when he put it like that. “I just didn’t think it was anyone’s business,” she said primly.

  George began to laugh and gave her a hug. “Well, it’s my business now.” He pulled a valise from the overhead rack and began to rummage through it. “But since you’ve told me about your true social standing, I’m guessing you probably aren’t going to think this gift is nearly as exciting as I’d hoped.”

  Paulien held her breath. A gift. Was he going to propose? It’s my business now. What else could it be after a comment like that? He pulled out an envelope and handed it to her. Not a ring.

  “Christmas isn’t until Wednesday,” she said as cheerfully as she could.

  “I misspoke, it isn’t actually a gift. It’s more like an investment in the future.”

  An investment in the future? That sounded promising. She removed a single sheet of paper from the envelope and stared at it, confused. A bill? A bank receipt of some sort? Then she realized it was an Everard Sureties Exchange statement and that her name was on the top. She looked at George.

  “For you,” he explained. “I opened an account for you back in September. Five hundred pounds. I want you to share in what I’m doing, to prosper along with me.”

  Paulien tried to appear pleased. If he really wanted her to prosper with him, he’d ask her to marry him. She smoothed the creases in the paper to gain some time. “Thank you,” she said finally. “It’s very sweet. But I thought you weren’t taking on any new investors.”

  George seemed oblivious to her disappointment, which was odd for a man so acutely attuned to her moods. “You’re not just an investor, my darling. I’m in love with you.”

  They had been speaking of love for months now, and there had been a few oblique references to a possible future together, yet something about this gift felt like a repudiation of those declarations. It was so businesslike, so unromantic, so unlike George—and so deeply disappointing.

  The words rushed out before she could rein them in. “If you love me so much, why don’t you want to marry me?” Her hands flew to her mouth.

  But George, being George, just laughed. “Can we have a big party?”

  “A big party?” she repeated, stunned at the turn the conversation had taken.

  “For the wedding—a big wedding party.”

  Now Paulien was laughing, too, with relief. “Yes,” she managed to say. “A very big party.”

  “Well then.” George dropped to one knee and pulled a small box from his jacket pocket.

  Paulien held her breath. He’d planned the whole thing to play out just as it had, the clever man. Such a jokester. He was going to ask her to marry him. And she was going to say yes.

  The ring was yet another example of George’s taste—and his understanding of hers. He easily could have bought an ostentatious diamond, but that wasn’t what he placed on her finger. The stone was neither large nor small, a carat and a half at most, a flawless thing that threw prisms of light throughout the compartment when she admired it. The simple platinum setting was perfect. As was the fit.

  Her parents were aghast at the news. Who was this British whippersnapper with a surname no one knew? Lacking the courtesy to ask a father’s permission before proposing marriage to his daughter? Giving her a ring before there had even been a proper introduction to the family? But within a couple of days, George had charmed them all, as Paulien knew he would.

  He played tennis with her brother Léon—who George claimed wasn’t pompous at all—and always let him win after what appeared to be a close game. He took Franck shooting and riding, played bridge with her mother, and discussed the textile business with her father. Even the extended family approved. Tante Natalie whispered one night that George was far more accomplished than Maxence Van de Velde and much more handsome. Both of which went without saying.

  George played poker with the boy cousins well into the night but was always up to share an early breakfast with her. It was unseasonably warm, and they took long walks together on the trails that wound through the estate. She showed him the barn on the backside of the lake where the Mertens Museum of Post-Impressionism would someday be housed, and he heartily approved of her plans and resourcefulness. The barn was also private and secluded and the perfect place to make love.

  There was endless talk of the wedding, which George was more interested in—and involved in—than Paulien. She would have preferred they go to the local church and marry the next day, but her mother and George would have none of it. And she had promised him a big party.

  Their original plan was to host it at the estate in August, when all Mertens weddings were held, but it quickly became apparent that there wasn’t enough time to organize the kind of extravaganza George and her mother had in mind, and it was pushed back to the following summer. This seemed an awfully long time to wait, but Paulien was overruled.

  What did she care? She was going to marry a man she adored, spend the rest of her life with him, laugh with him, have children with him. So what did another year matter? They would be together in London, and they had the vast future stretching ahead of them. It was all too wonderful and heady. She wasn’t about to bother herself with trifles.

  And she had to admit that it would be nice to have a wedding even better than her cousin Margaret’s had been. Not to mention marrying a man far better in all ways than that boring Herbert.

  Her father came and found her in the library one afternoon when George was off with Léon. “I’m very pleased for you, Paulie,” he said, sitting down in a chair near her. “He’s a fine young man.”

  “Thank you, Papa.” She closed her book and put it on the table. “Finer than Maxence Van de Velde?” she teased.

  For a moment he looked surprised. They hadn’t spoken of Maxence since she’d refused his ring and left for London, over a year ago. But her father quickly recovered himself and said, “It’s obvious that you care very much for George.”

  “Yes.” She smiled at his backhanded acknowledgment of defeat. “I love him, yes. Very much.”

  “I’ve looked into his Everard Sureties Exchange. Asked around. And I like what I hear. He’s apparently a very clever lad, a boy with ideas who’s also able to run a business. Quite successfully, I’m told. I’m also told his investors are pleased with their returns.”

  “Ah, checking up on him, were you?”

  “Unquestionably. You’re my daughter, my only daughter.” He looked at her with affection. �
��I’m not about to let you run off and marry some scoundrel.”

  “Well, you don’t have to worry about that, Papa. George even opened an Everard account for me in early September. With five hundred pounds. Just a few short months later, it’s worth almost six hundred—almost twenty percent more.”

  “You gave him five hundred pounds?” he asked suspiciously.

  “He used his own money, but the account’s in my name. A gift.” It amused her that what she’d initially considered an insult she now saw as a declaration of devotion.

  “So you’re the exception. He told me he isn’t taking on any new investors.”

  “Integrity is crucial to him. He’s been turning down even his biggest longtime backers because he wants to make sure he can deliver on his promises.” Her voice cracked. How lucky she was. How very lucky.

  “That is an important mark of a man. A fine thing in a husband—and in a son-in-law.”

  “Did you want to invest? Is that why you asked him about it?”

  “No, I was just curious.” He pulled a mock frown. “I am not sure how much extra cash I am going to have, now that it appears I have a very expensive wedding to put on. Your mother cannot constrain herself. I worry that she is going to invite the entire world.”

  “Maybe that’s why you should invest,” Paulien said, laughing. “You could make back the cost of the wedding in no time.”

  Her father stood, then leaned over and kissed her forehead. “I wish you both a lifetime of happiness, my dear.”

  “Thank you, Papa. I have no doubt that’s just what we’ll have.” As he turned, she added, “You should really think about Everard Sureties. As you said, George is a clever lad, and I’m sure I can persuade him to open an account for you. We’re all family now.”