“Morning, Bradley,” he answered, looking up from his work.
“Will, this is Ray Martin. He’ll be living with me in the Quaker Cottage.”
They shook hands, and Will noticed Ray’s pallor.
“What are you staring at?” Ray asked him.
The question and its tone caught the amiable young farm manager off guard, but he recovered immediately. “I didn’t know anyone else was moving into the Quaker Cottage. You’re not that sword fellow from California, are you?”
“No,” Ray answered and moved off a few steps, staring at the foothills in the western distance. Will looked at me quizzically, but I shook my head and mouthed the word, “later.” I wondered who the sword fellow from California was. I’d never before heard anyone mention that a sword fellow would be visiting.
The Hirshes’ Jeep Wagoneer was still parked at the station where I’d left it yesterday before catching the morning train on the Harlem Line into Grand Central. Lennie and Nora might need the Jeep today, although they also had a Mercedes station wagon. As a long-term non-paying guest, I thought it wise to anticipate such possibilities.
The train station was in the nearby town of Dover, an easy fifteen minutes away.
“I need a lift to pick up the Wagoneer,” I said to Will. “Can you help?”
“Sure. We can go right now if you want. Hop into the truck.”
“Ray,” I called. “Come with us. I have to pick up a car. We can take our hike later.”
Ray neither objected nor agreed, but followed us across the lawn and into Will’s pickup, where he got in beside me on the bench seat, next to the window. It didn’t surprise me that Will hadn’t known Ray was moving onto Schoolcross or that he didn’t ask about the opening last night. Nora kept the Hirshes’ country life well insulated from the decadent trappings of New York. They had sold Lennie’s apartment at One Fifth Avenue five years ago to keep him away from the artists’ hazards of hard drink, fast women, and limitless cocaine. Will was probably only dimly aware of the AFTAR exhibit, although it had occupied Lennie’s attention for months.
Will, a graduate of the SUNY agronomy program, tended the estate’s sheep, cattle, dairy barn, and vegetable gardens with the assistance of several farmhands, supplemented by seasonal laborers. The fruits of this work, in addition to being sold at the livestock or farmers’ markets, supplied much of the food for the estate.
Will was driving us along what everyone referred to as the Inner Circle, one of two long oval-shaped roadways covered with the expensive small round brown stones called pea gravel. The Inner Circle connected most of the houses and cottages on Schoolcross with one another. This inner drive was encompassed by a much larger Outer Loop. The Big House was in the approximate middle, like the epicenter of an enormous irregular watch face, with the perimeter of both circles at varying distances from this center point. Everything on Schoolcross was described in relation to the sundial on the western lawn directly in front of the Big House.
My Quaker Cottage, for example, was located across the Inner Circle at eleven o’clock, about two hundred yards from the Big House. The pea gravel of the Circle itself was accessed by an asphalt paved feeder road at the three-o’clock mark. This feeder road looped for two miles through the wooded hills, open fields, and fenced pastures of Schoolcross before reaching the massive entrance gates of the estate. The gates kept out curiosity seekers or other uninvited guests who might be tempted off the abutting state highway, which was named Millbrook School Road. As far as I knew, this feeder road, at least, didn’t have an insider’s name and was called simply the driveway.
As we approached the junction of the driveway with the Inner Circle and the Outer Loop, we passed a tiny stone cottage called the Buttons. It sat at two o’clock on the outer perimeter of the Inner Circle, also about two hundred yards from the Big House. I had often walked past the Buttons on my morning hikes.
Tamara Skye lived here. This morning the cottage was shut tight, curtains drawn, and the door to the garage where Tamara kept her aging Volvo was closed. The garage was almost as big as the Buttons.
“You a single fellow?” Will asked Ray.
“Yeah, why?”
“Thought so. Didn’t see a wedding ring. How’s your posture?” Will was smiling broadly.
“What’s so funny?”
“Nothing. I’m thinking about our neighbor Tamara. She lives in that house.”
Tamara, who was Nora’s yoga instructor, was a devotee and experienced lay practitioner of various esoteric healing arts.
“Tamara teaches a special posture technique,” I explained to Ray. “She has you stand up straight, and scream. It’s supposed to help your spine.”
Ray relaxed back into the seat and looked intently out the window. This was a posture to which I’d grown accustomed during our limousine rides yesterday.
I understood what Will was getting at. Ray and Tamara would make a remarkable couple. They were both quite physically attractive but in very different ways; Ray was tall with dark hair, and Tamara was a petite blond. Personally, I didn’t care for Tamara, but that was probably because she treated me like an outsider. Based on her access to Nora she held a privileged status among the hierarchy of estate hangers-on. The only other person who spent as much time with Nora was Lars, the Swedish masseur and fitness trainer. Lars lived with his longtime companion Mario, a woodworker and sculptor, in an apartment next to the South Stable, located at six o’clock, or due south, on the Inner Circle. Lars and Mario were always called the boys, and the renovated portion of the structure they occupied was the Cockpit. The enormous South Stable was no longer used for horses.
Several years ago, Nora had had constructed, at the one o’clock perimeter of the Inner Circle, a more modern, manageable structure called, reasonably enough, the North Stable. Except for the Cockpit portion of the older structure, everything around the South Stable was now closed up, used only for long-term storage.
During my stay at Schoolcross I’d become interested in the history of the estate and took advantage of this opportunity as Ray and I were being driven past to ask Will something I’d always wondered.
“Did the Cockpit have a name before the boys moved in?”
“What do you mean?”
Before I could reply, he laughed.
“Oh, I get it. You think it’s called the Cockpit because Lars and Mario live there together? No sir, it’s always been the Cockpit, Bradley. You know that sunken living room? That’s where they used to hold cockfights before Nora’s grandfather built the new Arena and the Keeper’s Cottage in the thirties.”
I’d seen the Arena and its adjacent Keeper’s Cottage on my walks. It was located on a more isolated section of the Circle—about eight o’clock from the sundial on the Big House lawn, perhaps five hundred yards away. I had assumed that the Arena, also now unused for anything as far as I could tell, had been some sort of indoor riding ring or covered horse exercise space.
“Cockfights here?” I asked.
“People used to come for miles to see them. He kept fifty fighting chickens at a time, or at least that’s what I’ve been told. Hell, Claude Rhodes still keeps a few, but don’t tell him I told you. Cockfighting is illegal.”
Claude Rhodes was the farmhand who lived in a cottage on the estate’s far northwestern perimeter, at least a mile from the Big House. Lennie had told me that he was English by birth but had come to the U.S. as a young man. He’d worked for Nora’s family “forever.” He was elderly now, but wiry, with apparent stamina. I’d seen him at work, usually wielding a chain saw, but we’d never spoken. His main function, as far as I could tell, was cutting up wind-fallen trees and stacking the results into enormous woodpiles. His American-born wife Gladys worked as a domestic in the Big House.
“Now the Keeper’s Cottage is fixed up as a getaway,” Will said. “No telephone, and no guests allowed when Nora and Lennie want privacy.”
We made the trip to the Dover train station in under twenty minutes, wi
th Will telling us more history along the way. I’d heard of the Van Leuyden family’s involvement with the cultural activities of old New York, but their immersion in country life was a surprise. Then, immediately, it wasn’t. Country life made perfect sense for the Van Leuydens. I wondered how much of this Ray was absorbing.
CHAPTER IV
◊
Lennie began to spend long hours working in his studio, venturing out only for brisk, silent walks. Nora, Ray, and I walked with him, meeting behind the Big House early each morning, hiking two rounds of the larger roadway called the Outer Loop, which enclosed the smaller Inner Circle. Our usual forty-five minute walk often alternated between portions of the Outer and the Inner, sometimes taking detours along smaller adjacent trails. This routine allowed time for me to catch the 9:20 a.m. from Dover on those mornings that I went into New York, making my business rounds of galleries, dealers, collectors, and auction houses. With this effort, plus endless hours on the telephone, my income remained steady.
Our morning walking routine was at first almost eerie in its predictability and then wonderfully relaxing. Nora’s relief at Lennie working again was obvious, and she was now warmly cordial with me, although she still said very little to Ray.
Near the end of our first walk—it was on Sunday, September 10—we settled on the terms for my exclusive representation of Ray’s work. Lennie had already thought the situation through, with Nora’s help I was sure, and had suggested an agreeable arrangement. We fine-tuned the details as we walked the Circles, and, with Lennie and Nora looking on, Ray and I agreed that in return for devoting at least fifteen percent of my time to directly promoting his work and indirectly promoting him at every opportunity, I would get fifteen percent of the net proceeds of any paintings sold, plus an allowance for direct expenses. Ray and I shook hands and Lennie said he would have someone write it up, but that was a formality.
Pricing was a tricky issue, but finally I concurred with Lennie (and Nora) that it was better to be too high than low. We set prices for each of the paintings in a range from eighteen to forty thousand dollars, based on size, with Lennie pushing toward the upper range. I had a friendly business relationship with the owner of a decent mid-tier gallery on Madison Avenue who would, for a reasonable fee, allow us storage and a space from which to show the work.
Most of the time, of course, I would still be assisting my clients with their collections. One of my biggest clients was Mr. Bell, a Texan now in his sixties, who’d made his first fortune in natural gas, doubled it in oil, and tripled it in real estate. An avid and astute collector, he often said that he considered me to be one of the family—closer to him than his own son, who was about my own age and whom everyone called Deuce. Once, at the family ranch outside of Houston, Mr. Bell made this remark while Deuce was present, lounging on a sofa in the trophy room. The father’s statement had drawn from the son only a prolonged “raspberry,” which was ostentatiously ignored by Mr. Bell. I envied them their casual bickering.
Despite Mr. Bell’s expressed familial sentiments toward me, however, he’d never asked me to call him by his first name, which is Richard. Deuce’s given name is Richard Davis Bell, II. Mine is James Compton Bradley, but everyone calls me “Bradley,” even my wife.
I don’t mind that Mr. Bell has never asked me to call him Richard. You don’t ascend to the heights of Texas billionaires by being a soft touch. He’d made his first unit (which is what he and his cronies call a hundred million dollars) before he was my age, thirty-five.
Mr. Bell had decided I was his “boy” the day he first met me at Weatherby’s, my second month back in the States. He said he liked me because I’d lived in London for several years but still talked like an American—I hadn’t come back with some fancy-pants accent. Linda said our time in London had “neutralized” my native New England accent, which hadn’t been particularly strong to begin with.
Over the past eight years I’d helped Mr. Bell build a world-class collection of modern and contemporary art. In the early days, he taught me more than I taught him, but I made myself useful scouting the world for the right acquisitions (“bird-dogging,” he called it). Now we were on equal status when it came to his collection. I’d argue him to a standstill if I thought he was making the wrong move. The proof, as he’d say, was in the puddin’. Since I’d begun working with him, he’d never been burned (Linda had helped me with authentication if there were any questions), and the Bell Collection was spectacular. I earned every penny of the generous retainer he paid me, along with a commission on all transactions.
I’d like to say that he was a typical client, but, in fact, he was my very best client. Others might have even more money, or know even more about art, but no one trusted me more than he did. I’d walk through fire for Mr. Bell, and he knew it. I wanted my father to meet him, and Mr. Bell and I had talked about it. But it hadn’t happened yet, and, given my father’s lack of interest in my career and his disdain for Texans, I didn’t know when it would.
Don’t misunderstand—my father isn’t a snob, at least not a snob of the conventional variety. A tenth-generation New England Yankee, he’d sent me to the local public schools though we lived in the shadow of Philips Academy in Andover. There’s no reason I couldn’t have attended Andover as a day student. But my father, who’d gone to Hotchkiss as a boarder, said he wanted me to experience the broadening effects of a public education. When he learned I’d been turned down by Harvard but accepted at the University of Virginia he’d remarked, “Good idea. Stay in the public education system.” Mother denied it, but I thought he was just glad to save the money.
Working with clients like Mr. Bell was my bread and butter, but I had sometimes also directly represented artists. For various reasons these relationships hadn’t lasted. The most promising, with a young Haitian painter named Peter Gaspard, ended abruptly one evening when he leaped from his fifth-story loft window onto the Soho street below, an hour after I’d dropped him off. This was four days after Mary had gone into the hospital—the day after the doctor had told us she was going to make it. I didn’t see the suicide coming, but neither had anyone else, including Peter’s several lovers.
Linda had said, “The whole thing has scarred you, Bradley,” but I didn’t feel that way. I didn’t feel anything, even sadness when it happened.
With several other artists after that, the chemistry hadn’t worked and they’d recently moved on. Or, as my father put it, been stolen by other more established dealers with their own gallery spaces.
Now I was representing Ray, who had the potential to be an art-world sensation. If things went well, he might have a decent income fairly quickly. He might even make a fortune, like Lennie, who had already earned more money than a man could spend in one lifetime. Some of this would depend on Ray’s early sales, which would, in turn, be influenced by the critics. They hadn’t yet spoken and I hadn’t yet sold a painting. We were all waiting expectantly for Jon Kenton’s review in the New York Times, which was unaccountably slow in coming out.
After three days, Nora stopped walking with us. The custom at Schoolcross was to let the horses rest during the heat of the summer. With the arrival of foxhunting season in September, their horseshoes were put back on and riding resumed. She had met the blacksmith one afternoon the previous week and her three horses were now shod, but despite my hints she didn’t mention our earlier conversations about riding together.
The morning walks continued without her and the atmosphere relaxed slightly. Conversation was limited at first to the farm, the weather, and the changes in the leaves. A spectacular fall was beginning to emerge, the reds and yellows unusually vivid, perhaps because of the abundant rain over the summer.
Lennie and I did most of the talking, but we discovered that Ray had a droll sense of humor. When the O.J. Simpson verdict was announced in October, he’d said, “Of course they found him innocent. You think they’d send a guilty person to the penitentiary?” And when Lennie, greatly upset, tried to talk about
the assassination of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin by a right-wing Jewish fanatic, Ray kept shifting the conversation to the small caliber of the pistol used by the assassin.
Ray was working his way through Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov and asked us who had murdered the old man. Lennie and I refused to snitch. Lennie was reading To a Violent Grave, the oral history biography of Jackson Pollack, which had been put together by his friend and Millbrook neighbor Jeffrey Potter. Lennie and I discussed Pollack’s career and work at length while Ray, apparently disinterested, only listened. I had begun to read Plato’s Republic, but bogged down and was re-reading The Carpetbaggers.
Beyond these casual conversations, Ray’s thoughts and emotions were, at first, entirely his own. But three weeks after his arrival on Schoolcross, a UPS truck delivered a trio of large, well-wrapped boxes, and he couldn’t hide his excitement. Lennie had arranged for Ray’s art supplies to be sent to him from the Lorton penitentiary and had supplemented them with some additions that Ray had said would be useful.
He carried the boxes into the first-floor sitting room, which we had agreed would be used exclusively as his studio. I was glad to make this concession; my own needs were well served by the little desk in the kitchen. I watched as he cut the wrapping tape with a carving knife and unpacked the boxes carefully, examining his paints and brushes from Lorton and admiring the new canvas from Lennie.
After the arrival of these supplies he spent most of his hours working. Now, the door was always closed, keeping his works-in-progress private. Although I was beset by curiosity to see how freedom affected his work, I respected his privacy. He never talked about his painting, saying only that he would show me when he was ready.
The morning after Ray’s supplies had arrived, I missed the beginning of our walk because of a round of early calls. I’d completed a successful bidding by telephone the previous week for a painting auctioned in Paris. Mr. Bell was hunting Dall ram in the Pacific Northwest and wasn’t due back for another week. Despite his earlier instructions his banker said she needed to talk to him before authorizing a payment that large, and the French auction house had become apprehensive.
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