“Uh-huh. And at the Villa Louisa it’s ugly people dressed in 1926 styles?”
“No, normal everyday people dressed like normal everyday people. It’s quiet there. Restful, understated, an old wood-burning fireplace in my bedroom, another big river-rock one out on the patio. No bar. No TVs. At night they show classic movies under the stars. Last night I watched a Cary Grant from 1932. They have these lounge chairs you can lie back and snooze in if you want.”
Chris was quiet for a few seconds. “You know,” she said thoughtfully, “that really does sound like my kind of place.”
“Good, I’ll call them and make a reservation for you right now. I think the bungalow next to mine is free.”
“No, not there! Good heavens! I meant the Colony Palms. Are you kidding me?”
Alix had been in Lillian Brethwaite’s presence no more than fifteen minutes in total: once when she was offered the job, and then later, when she’d arrived to go to work, a five-minute welcoming to introduce her to the curatorial staff. Still, she knew a lot about the director, mostly gleaned during a lunch at a taqueria just south of downtown that garrulous, slightly boozy Alfie had treated her to on her first day. He’d hardly paused for mouthfuls of shrimp fajita between witty, rambling observations about the institution’s shortcomings, dysfunctionalities, and appalling policy changes, especially since—here he stopped to make obeisance with upraised hands—“the coming of the Boy Wonder, blessed of God, all praise him.” Later there had been a couple of coffee breaks with Madge and Drew, who had been equally forthcoming. Added to that, she’d simply overheard enough griping among the staff to know that all was not well at the Brethwaite, and that the new senior curator was unloved.
Thus it was with sharp anticipation that she sat herself down in a creamy leather chair in the richly furnished boardroom, with a cup of coffee and an almond biscotto in front of her. She sat at one of the long sides of the table, between Prentice and Alfie and facing Madge and Drew, all with coffee and biscotti of their own. Some were abstractedly fingering their biscotti, but nobody was eating. Alfie was leafing through the Desert Sun newspaper without really reading it. The others were silent and frowning, sunk in their own thoughts. Neither Clark nor Mrs. B had shown up yet.
When several minutes had passed without anyone saying anything, Alix, having grown uncomfortable, said: “People? Is anything wrong? Has something happened?”
“Don’t ask,” Alfie said, without looking up from his paper.
“Yes, ‘something’ has happened,” Drew said with an arid laugh.
“There are a few organizational changes being considered,” Prentice said.
“Ha.” Drew again.
Another thirty seconds of silence, and then Madge, whom Alix already knew to be an eager gossiper, couldn’t hold it in any longer. “Oh, there’s no reason to keep the poor woman in suspense. It’s not exactly a secret.”
“And if it were, you wouldn’t exactly be the one to keep it, would you?” Drew said meanly.
Over the past few days, Alix had chatted often with the curators and had learned a lot about them. From her standpoint, Drew Temple was the least likable of the bunch, a dour, unhelpful, vaguely reptilian man with a long nose that drooped at the tip, like a cartoon witch’s, and a thin-lipped, extraordinarily wide gash of a mouth that made her think of a Muppet, but without the sunny disposition. He said little, but what he did say was unfailingly critical or negative, and delivered with a condescension she found immensely irritating. Behind the tiresome, rote carping, she sensed someone who was keeping a tight lid on a long, meticulously maintained list of bottled-up grievances.
His comment had no effect on his wife, who explained the morning’s bombshell clearly and succinctly: The Photography department had already been scrubbed and its curator dumped—that was now history. But beyond that, Prints and Drawings (Alfie’s department) was to be combined with Paintings (Prentice’s department) into a single department of Paintings and Drawings; and Decorative Arts (Drew’s department) and Costumes and Furnishings (Madge’s department) would become a single department of Costumes and Decorative Arts.
Alix nodded. “I see.” No wonder they all seemed so worried. “So then, what used to be four departments will become two.”
“Clever woman,” Drew observed. “Not much gets by her.”
Alix ignored him. “Are there only going to be two curator-level positions then?”
Not even Madge seemed eager to answer that question, and it was Prentice who finally did. “Yes, only two. According to Clark, Madge will be the Costumes and Decorative Arts curator, and Drew will become assistant curator responsible for the decorative arts segment. As for Paintings and Drawings, it has yet to be decided as to whether Alfie or I will assume the mantle.”
Alix stared at him. Was he serious? Has yet to be decided? Prentice Vandervere or Alfie? She liked Alfie, she had nothing at all against Alfie, but compared to Prentice . . . !
Alfred Carpenter Wellington, she had learned (from Alfie himself), had been born to wealth and status, the scion of an old Virginia family. He had done well in school, but everything had come too easily and he had grown lazy and bored. He was sent to Yale, where he partied and enjoyed himself, working all the way up to a PhD in art history without expending much time or effort. After that he’d taught at an exclusive Connecticut prep school for a while but didn’t enjoy it, and quit. He’d married an aspiring singer who later joined a rock band that came up with a huge hit. From then on she had been a celebrity and Alfie had shrunk into a sort of hanger-on. It wasn’t long before he’d started drinking. One too many of his scenes in public soon led to a divorce. From there things continued to go downhill. He lost most of his money in the stock market crash of 1987, and had taken on a succession of jobs he couldn’t hold on to. In 1998, the Brethwaite came through with a surprise job offer and he’d been there ever since: still in the same job after sixteen years. Still the same person too: still bright, still lazy, still unambitious (this is all Alfie talking), and still a boozer, though a more moderate one than he’d been before.
Still an amiable person, too, and pleasant to be around, but miles shy of Prentice in experience, ability, presence, and everything else. What kind of game was Clark playing at?
Alfie had obviously been asking himself the same question. “Does anybody here seriously think Clark would put me over you, Prentice?” He shook his head. “Get real.”
“It’s hardly as ridiculous as you make it sound, Alfie,” said Prentice. “You have a good many—”
“Of course it’s ridiculous! It’s his nasty little joke, Prentice. He’s just saying it to demean you, that’s all.”
“And what makes you think he won’t do it to demean him?” Drew asked.
Alfie took a swig from his suspect mug. “If he did, I’d never accept the position,” he said with dignity. “Prentice is a legend. The museum is lucky to have him.”
“I don’t agree with you, Alfie,” Prentice said, “and I sincerely urge you not to do that. But I want you to know how much I appreciate your words.”
“Oh, I’ll do it, all right,” Alfie said and went back to his newspaper. “It would be a travesty.”
Well done, Dr. Wellington, Alix thought with a swell of affection, good for you. But, she wondered, what about the other change that was in the works: the one that would make Madge her husband’s superior and, presumably, boss? Drew didn’t strike her as the kind of man who’d be able to handle that. It wasn’t altogether a matter of chauvinism, either. In some ways he could make a pretty good case that, on paper anyway, the curatorship was going to the wrong person. He, too, was a Yale PhD in art history, and had been an adjunct professor at Brown when he applied for the position at the Brethwaite. Madge, by comparison, had no “Dr.” in front of her name and wasn’t really an art historian at all. She had an MS in costume design and technology from the University of Cincin
nati and had worked in theater and taught continuing education courses at a community college in Providence when Drew had been at nearby Brown. When Lillian Brethwaite had hired Drew, Madge—then his fiancée—had come along as part of the package, to install and head the new, relatively small Costumes and Furnishings department, which had since grown considerably. Alix had no doubt that Madge herself thought she was fully competent to curate the entire new Costumes and Decorative Arts collection and was the right choice for the job. That Drew saw it that way was doubtful in the extreme.
Alfie was now reading the newspaper with more attention, and Alix glanced at the front-page story that seemed to have caught him up: “Phantom Strikes Again: This Time the Ocotillo Lodge.”
“The Phantom,” Alix said, making conversation. “What is that about?”
“Actually, it’s interesting, there’s this thief, the Phantom Burglar, they call him, he never leaves a clue, the police don’t—uh-oh.” He set down his cup and straightened up. “Gird thy loins,” he whispered, “man the bulwarks, hoist the . . .”
There had been a perceptible stiffening in the room as those in it sensed the director’s imminent entrance, which she made with long, quick, confident strides and more than a hint of swagger.
The Iron Lady, they called her, and she looked the part, a keen-eyed, wiry old woman with a face full of crosshatched wrinkles, weather-beaten and parched by nearly six decades of desert sun. She wore the same expression Alix had seen during their single face-to-face interaction, one eyebrow slightly arched in a lemme-see-you-try-and-put-one-over-on-me-pal look. She wore her straight, gray-streaked hair long and bound in a none-too-neat, old-fashioned bun with a nasty-looking dagger of a tortoiseshell comb stuck through it. When Alix had seen her before, she’d been wearing a mannish, well-tailored pantsuit. This time she was in a beat-up denim jacket and jeans worn over an old, much-laundered, open-throated white shirt. She looked as if she’d just arrived from breaking in a stubborn horse or two that had been too much for the hands down at the ranch. As a matter of fact, she did own a ranch a few miles south of town, so who knew, maybe she had.
Twenty years earlier, in her mid-forties, she had married a manufacturer of plastic barrels for ballpoint pens, a man with the unlikely and uniquely unsuitable name of Lillienburger, but, to no one’s surprise, marriage didn’t suit her. Soon divorced, she had quickly and understandably discarded the “Lillian Lillienburger” name and gone back to “Brethwaite.” At the museum, she preferred to be addressed as Mrs. B (“not Miz, if you don’t mind”), and so it was.
Her approach to running the museum fit the “Iron Lady” sobriquet too. She was the founding director, having been handed the reins directly by her father when it opened in 1996. The museum consisted almost entirely of his own collection, and she had indeed ruled it with an iron fist and a protective, frostily possessive attitude. She was demanding and domineering with the staff and no less dictatorial with museum visitors. There were strictly enforced, prominently displayed standards of dress and deportment for those members of the public who ventured onto the premises.
These premises had been her childhood home, after all. She had grown up with most of the works of art that were on the walls now, so as far as she was concerned, visitors were little more than vulgar interlopers and rubberneckers to be tolerated only because her father had so willed it, and only so long as they behaved themselves. She was famous for having once called the police to demand that some poor guy be arrested and hauled off for “willfully despoiling private property.” He had been eating a donut and drinking a carton of milk—while leaning against his car, out in the parking area.
As to the board of trustees, they were local businessmen and -women whom she herself, as its chair, had appointed, and at whose pleasure they served. A dozen years ago, two of them had stood up for themselves and voted against her on some now-forgotten issue. By the next day they had been dismissed, and since then no further insurgencies had arisen. People didn’t mess with Lillian Brethwaite.
But according to what Alix had been hearing, things had changed four months ago, which was when Mrs. B had met Clark Calder at a meeting of the Association of Private Museums. She had been impressed (or charmed, or smitten, or conned, depending on whom you talked to) by the glib, patently ambitious Clark to the extent of creating a new position for him as senior curator. He had taken up the job within the week, and it quickly became clear to the others that he could do little wrong in Lillian’s eyes. Almost everything he proposed had either been implemented or was scheduled for implementation: relaxing the dress code to the extent that nothing short of showing up topless or with bare feet would deny you entrance; extracting a $15 “suggested donation” from visitors (admission had previously been free); creating Patron-level and Fellow-level museum memberships at $250 and $500 respectively, whereas there had previously existed only the $50 General level (shortly to become $75); and various other changes to remedy the museum’s dire financial situation.
And of course it had been on Clark’s recommendation that IMS be brought in to do the two-month study of “client interface experience” that had resulted in the monumental shakeup now under way: the deaccession by auction of many “surplus” works of art (the first deacessioning in the museum’s history), the banishment to storage of many others that failed to meet monetized eyeball criteria, and the resultant shrinking of curatorial departments. It was also Clark who had engaged Endicott to handle the auction, and who was now negotiating terms and arrangements with them.
Through all of this, so Alix had heard, Mrs. B had sat back as her Golden Boy implemented his twenty-first-century business marketing strategies. And to his credit (this was said grudgingly, with qualifications), the desperate financial circumstances that the Brethwaite, along with so many other non-profits, had found itself in with the recession had markedly improved since his arrival, and it appeared that the museum might actually be in the black again in the not-too-distant future.
Nonetheless, it wasn’t Mrs. B’s nature to fade decorously into the background. Every now and then, Alix had been told, Clark would step out of line or get a little too pushy for her, and she would cut her senior curator to pieces as brutally as she would anybody else. This was a source of rare pleasure for the staff, and apparently, this was to be one of those mornings. She began without preamble.
“Clark, before we get to the agenda—I’ve decided not to present to the board your proposal to include a graphic novel show to next year’s exhibition schedule.”
“Oh, I think that might be a mistake, Mrs. B. The last time the Institute of Graphic Novels put a similar show on the road, six museums in California and Arizona took part, and the income it generated for each of them in a single month-long exhibition was equal to—”
“There is more to museums than income generation, Clark, as important as that may regrettably be.”
From the corner of Alix’s eye she saw Prentice’s chin dip in a barely perceptible nod of approval, and it brought to mind another remark of his—actually in one of his published essays—that had stuck with her through the years. “Income—profit—must never be the goal of an art museum, but only the means to higher ends. Otherwise, what exactly is the point? Self-perpetuation? There is a great difference between running a museum in a businesslike manner, which is a good and necessary thing, and running it as a business, which is neither.”
“The heart of the matter,” Mrs. B went on, “is simply this: I am not having comic books on display alongside my father’s Audubons and Whistlers. It won’t do.”
Clark threw back his shaggy blond mane for an airy laugh. “Graphic novels are a long way from your father’s old Superman and Captain America comics full of Bam!s and Pow!s, Mrs. B. They’re taught in literature seminars now, and reviewed in serious journals as the postmodern supra-literary constructions that they are. Nowadays, they’re rightfully seen as unique, sequentially generated narratives, w
hich make possible levels of subtext that ordinary—”
But Mrs. B refused to put up with the jargon. “I know what graphic novels are, Clark. They are strips of cartoonish, generally morbid drawings of people and talking animals with dialogue balloons over their heads. Otherwise known as comic books. And we are not having them at the Brethwaite.”
She spoke with severity, snapping off the words, and Alix saw surreptitious satisfaction shine on the faces of Drew, Madge, and Alfie. Even Prentice looked discreetly pleased.
“Mrs. B, they’d be in the temporary exhibition area, completely separate from the permanent collection. You wouldn’t even be able to see—”
“Have I been unclear, Clark? I don’t believe I have been unclear. Does anyone else think I have been unclear? Pay attention now, Clark. We . . . are not having . . . that crap . . . in the Brethwaite. Would you like me to say it one more time—more slowly yet, so that you can grasp it in its entirety?”
Wow, Alix thought, if Clark was supposed to be her favorite, he had it wrong; this really was one tough old bird.
Clark’s cheeks flushed, but he managed to laugh it off with twinkling good grace. That smile of his really was a winner. “Not necessary, Mrs. B. I think you’ve pretty well seared it into my brain.”
Mrs. B relaxed into a near smile herself, having made her point: When push came to shove, she still held the whip hand. “Good. Let’s move on. Alix, the board has unanimously accepted your bid to clean three of the paintings going to auction—the Sargent, the Eakins, and the Mary Cassatt still life—as long as you can guarantee to have the work completed by the time of the auction.”
“Thank you, Mrs. B. I should have them done in ten days; two weeks on the outside.”
“However . . .” Mrs. B’s long, knobby fingers drummed delicately, perhaps nervously, on the glossy tabletop. “. . . However, there is one issue—”
The Art Whisperer (An Alix London Mystery) Page 4